[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 social and political consequences of being a black woman coming of age during the second half of the twentieth century. In her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry she confronts bluntly the history of the oppression of her people and, more recently, the oppression of her planet. Her wish for black men and women is that they not merely survive, but survive whole, as she has done. From the time she first appeared on the literary scene in 1968 with a collection of poems called Once, Walker has viewed her writing as a means of survival. When she was nearing fifty, she expressed surprise that she was not a suicide before the age of thirty, but she explains in the introduction to her fifth volume of poetry, Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991), "I have climbed back into life over and over on a ladder made of words, but knitted, truly, by the Unknowable."
Walker's optimism is ultimately born of her belief that something of the divine exists in every human and nonhuman participant in the universe.
