Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin come to mind. There is a point in the life arc of a prolific and talented author when the writer himself/herself becomes the story. “How incredible in some ways it is to thirst for pen and paper, to need them, as if they were water.” A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend. her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South an early miscarriage writing her first novel the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement erotic encounters and enduring relationships the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple winning the Pulitzer Prize being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism and burying her mother. In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world. From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual.įor the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple.

Gathering blossoms under fire