"Though many caution against pulling back the curtain on a writer's life, which is at once bound up in and obscured by the public-facing pages they generate, writers such as Alice Walker command attention that must be paid in full, from a childhood marked by physical pain and blindness, to almost simultaneously bringing her first novel and her first child into the world (a mere three-day span between the former and the latter), this is not the full story, of course, but it's enthralling and essential reading nonetheless."

--Linda

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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.

Evelyn C. White, journalist, author, and editor of The Black Women's Health Book, is a visiting scholar in women's studies at Mills College. She lives in Oakland, California, and in Canada.