Alice Malsenior Walker was born to Willie Lee and Minnie Walker on February 9, 1944. She was born in highly segregated Eatonon, Georgia. Her family were sharecroppers, like many of her fictional characters. She is the youngest of eight children. At a young age, she was accidentally shot in her right eye with a bb gun, which caused her to be partially blind. As a result of her blindness and eye discoloration, she became extremely self-conscious. She found solace in writing poetry and being outdoors. Walker attended segregated schools, that were inferior to white schools. Regardless of growing up in a poor environment, Walker was supported by community and family members.
After graduating from high school, she attended Spelman college with a scholarship, where she found her love for civil and equal rights. In 1963, she received a scholarship for Sarah Lawrence College in New York. she transferred to this university to complete her studies and graduated two year later. While attending Sarah Lawrence, she studied abroad in Africa as an exchange student. Upon returning she took up work as a head start teacher for underprivileged children in Mississippi. It was in Jackson, Mississippi where she met her husband, Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer. Despite her activism for equal rights for women and African Americans, she married a white man and had a baby by him. Their marriage ended in divorce seven years after it began.
In 1968, Alice Walker published her first collection of poetry, Once. in the 1970s she served as a writer-in-residence and as a teacher in the Black Studies program at Jackson State College in Tennessee and Tougaloo College in Mississippi. While being an educator, she began to write her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Walkers third and most famous novel, The Color Purple like many of her other novels, is about poor black youth oppressed.
Alice's Life 