Alice Walker Argumentative Essay Example
Alice Walker Argumentative Essay Example

Alice Walker Argumentative Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (660 words)
  • Published: May 28, 2017
  • Type: Autobiography
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Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia to Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker. Her family had a background in sharecropping and her mother supplemented their income by working as a maid.

As the youngest of eight siblings, she had an accident at the age of 8 while playing Cowboys and Indians with one of her brothers involving a BB gun. This resulted in partial blindness and scar tissue development in her right eye. Due to this incident, her classmates bullied her, but unfortunately, her family couldn't fully understand the situation. Consequently, she grew up as a shy and introverted young woman.

In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, Alice Walker disclosed that she believed herself to be unappealing and deformed for a lengthy period of time. As a result, she was self-conscious and a

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pprehensive and would often react defensively to inadvertent insults and affronts. Nevertheless, her adoration for reading and writing poetry emerged during this phase. Following six years, surgeons extracted the scar tissue from her eye leading her to become both prom queen and class valedictorian at high school. Though her insecurities about her eye waned, she still felt like an outsider; thus finding solace through literature.

(New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2012) Alice was awarded a state scholarship to attend Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961, where she became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. However, after two years she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York where she continued to be an active participant in the movement, ultimately earning her BA degree in 1965. Additionally, she worked as a social worker in New York and was

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instrumental in registering black voters in Liberty Town, Georgia. Alice went on to marry Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a white civil rights attorney, in 1967. The couple resided in Jackson, Mississippi.

Alice had a daughter named Rebecca Grant in 1969, the same year she finished her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. She left Mississippi after her marriage ended in 1976 and relocated to Jackson where she took on the role of black history advisor for a Head Start program. While in Jackson, she assumed the position of writer-in-residence at both Jackson State College and Tougaloo College. In addition, Alice taught and spoke at several colleges and universities post-graduation and in subsequent years.

(New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2012) Alice Walker is a successful author who has written various literary works. Her debut book of poems, Once (1968), was followed by In Love and Trouble, which features a series of short stories, as well as Revolutionary Petunias, another poetry collection. She also wrote her first children's book Langston Hughes: American Poet. However, it is her novel The Color Purple (1982) that brought her great recognition. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award for Fiction in 1983 and was later adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985 before being turned into a Broadway musical in 2005.

Alice Walker is a prolific writer who has published numerous works including The Color Purple, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). In her recent publications like Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel (2010), Hard

Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and The Chicken Chronicles (2012), she continues to prioritize activism and writing. Her love for reading and poetry was shaped by early social interactions which have been analyzed from a sociocultural psychological perspective that emphasizes how cultural determinants and social interactions shape our thoughts and behavior.

As per Biography.com, the author faced bullying from peers because of her scarred eye. This resulted in her feeling self-conscious and withdrawing from society. However, I believe that she discovered solace in reading and using poetry as an outlet for expression. Moreover, growing up in the racially segregated South and observing the unfair treatment of her sharecropper parents under Jim Crow laws probably played a role in inspiring her to become a political activist.

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