Alice Walker

The Color Purple, published in 1982, is written as letters, most of them from Celie, a poor Black woman in rural Georgia who is handed from her stepfather to a husband and slowly finds her own footing across some forty years. It took the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, making Alice Walker the first Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer, and Steven Spielberg filmed it in 1985 with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944 to sharecroppers, Walker lost the sight of one eye at eight when her brother fired a BB gun. She studied at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence, registered voters in Georgia and Mississippi, coined the word womanist in her 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, and in 1973 tracked down Zora Neale Hurston's unmarked grave in Florida and paid for a headstone. Her praise since 2012 for David Icke, whose writing carries hostility to Jews, has drawn sustained criticism and cost her festival invitations.