Everyday Use Summary
Alice Walker

Everything you need to understand or teach Everyday Use by Alice Walker.

Everyday Use Summary & Study Guide
2 Student Essays
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30 Everyday Use Lessons
20 Activities
180 Multiple Choice Questions
60 Short Essay Questions
20 Essay Questions
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Everyday Use Summary

"Everyday Use" was published early in Alice Walker's writing career, appearing in her collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women in 1973. The work was enthusiastically reviewed upon publication, and "Everyday Use" has since been called by some critics the best of Walker's short stories. In letting a rural black woman with little education tell a story that affirms the value of her heritage, Walker articulates what has since become, as critic...

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Alice Walker Biographies (8)

Alice Malsenior Walker

1,295 words, approx. 5 pages

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Alice Walker (born 1944) was best known for her stories about black women who achieve heroic stature within the confines of their ordinary day-to-day lives.Alice Walker... Read more

Alice (Malsenior) Walker

5,781 words, approx. 20 pages

Alice Walker is a talented, versatile writer from the modern South. Since the appearance of her first book in 1968, she has published poetry, fiction, and criticism, all of which have advanced her li... Read more

Alice (Malsenior) Walker

8,165 words, approx. 28 pages

Since 1968 when Once, her first work, was published, Alice Walker has sought to bring closer that day for which her maternal ancestors waited--"a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be... Read more

Alice (Malsenior) Walker

13,404 words, approx. 45 pages

[This entry was updated by Donna Haisty Winchell (Clemson University) from her entry in DLB 143: American Novelists Since World War II, Third Series, pp. 277-292.]Alice Walker knows firsthand the soci... Read more

Alice Malsenior Walker

9,879 words, approx. 33 pages

Biography EssaySince 1968 when Once, her first work, was published, Alice Walker has sought to bring closer that day for which her maternal ancestors waited-"a day when the unknown thing that was in ... Read more

Alice Walker

5,796 words, approx. 20 pages

Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, as well as for its adaptation as a motion picture by Steven Spielberg, Alice Walker has become a totem for black feminism, what she c... Read more

Alice Walker

3,302 words, approx. 12 pages

Alice Walker was the leading English textual critic of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of her scholarship was undertaken to prepare for the editing of William Shakespeare, particularly the Oxford Old-Spelli... Read more

Alice Walker

10,204 words, approx. 35 pages

Walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, about seventy-five miles southeast of Atlanta. She was the youngest of eight children, five boys and three girls, all of whom lived in a three-or... Read more

Essays & Analysis (2)

Separating the Flames of Reality

812 words, approx. 3 pages

In Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use," Wangero could have thought: "Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust." Once the house burned, it, and its history is dead--lost in the flames-- the joy in a new... Read more

Symbols of Heritage in "Everyday Use"

1,217 words, approx. 5 pages

In "Everyday Use," Alice Walker explores the controversy between the mother and her two daughter's ideas about their values and heritages. While the mother lives a simple life, the oldest daughter, De... Read more

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