In the following interview, Walker discusses her background, her writing, and her major literary influences.

In the following essay, Royster discusses the complicated relationship between Walker and her audience and asserts that Walker's female protagonists are representations of Walker's perceptions of herself.

In the following essay, Washington asserts that Walker does present some positive black male images in her work, and that her criticism of black men and women is in the spirit of helping them to grow and improve.

In the following essay, Hall Petry discusses the differences between the short stories of Walker's In Love and Trouble and her stories in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, asserting that the stories in the first collection are much stronger than those in the second.

In the following essay, Christian discusses how the women of Walker's In Love and Trouble fight to embrace their individual spirits and to overcome convention.

In the following essay, Bradley traces the development of Walker's career and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of her writing.

In the following essay, Cowart explains how Alice Walker uses her main characters in “Everyday Use” to outline her own vision of the African American community in the past and present, as well as their struggle for identity and liberation.

In the following essay, Willis discusses the women of Walker's fiction, in particular Meridian, and their relationship to their history and community. She asserts that revolution can only succeed when an individual commits herself to the community.

In the following essay, Worsham includes Walker in a discussion of mother-daughter relationships as represented in African-American women's poetry.

In the following essay, Nowak maintains that Walker's poetry successfully represents a personal journey toward self-knowledge and respect.

In the following essay, Butler discusses Walker's complicated portrayal of the South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in which she uses each life to show a different aspect of the South.

In the following essay, Christian discusses the interdependence of individual and societal change in Walker's novels.

In the following essay, Buckman analyzes how the body can become a site of colonization, and the different methods of resistance as shown in Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy.

In the following essay, originally published in 1991, Davis concludes that Walker's volumes of poetry serve as a subtext of “resurgence and resurrection” to her novels and short stories.

In the following essay, Freeman compares the journeys of the main characters of several of Walker's works, including Meridian, to the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland takes the adult life of its title character as the historical delimitation of its fictional action, roughly comprising three generations from the 1920's to the peak of the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960's (as marked by systematic black voters' registration, freedom marches and the first struggles for school integration). Half a century of family history is the narrative material used by the novel to dramatize essential changes in the conditions...

In the following review, Levin admits the importance of stopping the practice of female genital mutilation, but asserts that Warrior Marks, by Walker and Pratibha Parmar shows a lack of understanding of cultural differences.

From whatever vantage point one investigates the work of Alice Walker—poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, essayist, and apologist for black women—it is clear that the special identifying mark of her writing is her concern for the lives of black women. (p. 133) [There] are more than twenty-five characters from the slave woman to a revolutionary woman of the sixties [about whom she has written]. Within each of these roles Walker has examined the external realities facing these women as w...

In the following essay, Williams includes Walker in a discussion of women poets.

In the following review of Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Turner contrasts Walker's poetry with that of Ishmael Reed, praising Walker's simple style and honesty.

One of the major concerns of Alice Walker's art is the exploration of intra-family relationships…. The family dynamic in Alice Walker's work is a key part of the formative influence of "what has gone before." In Walker's first novel, the family configuration is defined by the child's special relationship to her grandfather and by the tension between father and grandfather. The use of the family as an imaginative structure—as a way of organizing experie...

In the following review, Phillips discusses similarities among Walker's Once, Ntozake Shange's Nappy Edges, and Audre Lord's Our Dead Behind Us.

[The double-consciousness of which W.E.B. Dubois writes,] "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity," produces two warring factions: To be an American and a Black person. The struggle between these two unreconciled strivings threatens to plunge the Black American, in particular the Black artist, into a sort of half-way house, where the artist is neither accepted ...

In the following review, Mann praises Walker's and Pratibha Parmar's attempt to illuminate the prevalence of female genital mutilation in Africa, but faults the book for a slow start.

In the following essay, Cornish provides an overview of Walker's works, discussing her role as the most prominent woman writer in the United States at the time.

In the following review, Messud states that while many of Walker's earlier short stories are skillful, her later stories are more like memoirs or essays which uphold a political agenda rather than art.

In the following review, Prose criticizes the boasting and complaining tone of Walker's The Same River Twice, a book comprised of essays, interviews, fan letters, and other writings.

In the following review, Gernes praises Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, but finds some of Walker's political poems to be overwrought.

Like the Victorians, we consider certain subjects fit for fiction and others too hot to handle. Unlike the Victorians, however, we don't know we think that—we're too busy congratulating ourselves on our sexual frankness to see that there might be other sorts of blindness and prudery. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the contemporary short story. Anyone browsing among a recent year's worth of American magazines might reasonably conclude that short fiction is by de...

In the following review, Brown worth praises Warrior Marks by Walker and Pratibha Parmar for exploring the reasons that female genital mutilation and other forms of mutilation are allowed to continue.

There is nothing cool or throwaway in Alice Walker's attitude toward the materials of her fiction. The first book by this exceptionally productive novelist, poet, and short-story writer to come to my notice was Meridian (1976), an impassioned account of the spiritual progress of a young black woman, Meridian Hill, during the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s and its aftermath…. Though beset by serious structural problems and other lapses of craft, Meridian remains the most impressive fictiona...

As admirers of The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian already know, to read an Alice Walker novel is to enter the country of surprise. It is to be admitted to the world of rural black women, a world long neglected by most whites, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of willed indifference. The loss is ours, for the lives of these women are so extraordinary in their tragedy, their culture, their humor and their courage that we are immediately gripped by them. (p. 181) No writer has made the intimate...

[Alice Walker's Meridian and You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down] are difficult in that, to varying degrees, they presuppose a certain special awareness on the part of their readers; they are also, at best, strong and passionately visionary pieces of prose with a quality of the epic poem. They are heirs to the dream of Martin Luther King, and are at the same time committed and coolly clearsighted concerning its progress. The feminism of … [Alice Walker] is the source of … [her] deta...

In the following essay, Lasdun provides a mixed review of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful.

Walker's poems [in Good Night Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning]—dealing with her parents (Willie Lee is her father), friends and lovers, black history—use clean, clear language and syntax. Sometimes they address the reader directly; often they carry morals and are written as allegories, somewhat reminiscent of Stephen Crane's little symbolic story-poems: "Never offer your heart / to someone who eats hearts / who finds heartmeat / delicious / but not rare / wh...