Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944. She was the eighth and last child of
Willie Walker and Minnie Grant, two sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia. Her parents'
experiences with the oppressive sharecropping system and the bitter racism of Southern
whites greatly influenced her writing. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland,
deals with the struggles of black sharecroppers in the racist South. When Walker was
eight, one of her brothers accidentally shot her and permanently blinded her in one eye.
Ashamed of her facial disfigurement, Walker isolated herself from other children, reading
On a scholarship for disabled students, Walker enrolled in Spelman College in
1961. While she was there, she became active in the Civil Rights Movement. Two years
later, she left Spelman and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College on another scholarship.
She traveled to Uganda as an exchange student. When she returned for her senior year,
she was shocked to learn that she was pregnant. Afraid of her parents' reaction, she
considered suicide. However, a classmate helped her obtain a safe abortion. She graduated
The quote of Alice Walker that I chose to write about is one stating,"People tend
to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but
actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't." This shocked me as a
powerful quote for many reasons. One of them is about progress, and I think that she is
stating it as the progress blacks had to make in life to just go on. For example to be
accepted in society and for her growing up to learn how to progress. Also, in the summer
of 1952 Alice Walker was blinded in her right eye by a BB gun pellet while playing
"cowboys and Indians" with her brothers. She was left with permanent damage in her eye
and remained facially disfigured. To move on and still be able to do all th
...