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 calls "womanism." An outspoken proponent for causes ranging from civil and women's rights to environmentalism, Walker has taken her one-woman campaign worldwide, agitating for an end to female genital mutilation in Africa, as well as for religious and racial understanding in the United States. Daughter of Southern sharecroppers, a one-time voter registration worker in the South, and a woman of color, Walker knows firsthand about the pernicious effects of oppression. Mere survival is not what Walker is about: she desires that black men and women, as well as citizens of the globe in general, learn how to survive whole, to carry human dignity along with them.

Much of Walker's work is polemic; the best...