Drawing on papers, letters, journals, and extensive interviews with Walker, her family, friends, and colleagues--and with leading American cultural figures including Gloria Steinem, Quincy Jones, and Oprah Winfrey--White assesses one of the most influential writers of modern time.
Alice Walker's life is remarkable not only because she was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (the book that won her that award, The Color Purple, has been translated into nearly thirty languages and made into an Academy Award-nominated film), but also because these accomplishments are merely highlights of a luminous and varied career made from inauspicious beginnings in rural Georgia. Drawing on extensive interviews and exhaustive research, Evelyn C. White brings this life to light.