What is Alice Walker’s net worth?
Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, and activist who has a net worth of $8 million. Alice Walker is best known for writing The Color Violet. For the book, she became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker’s other works included the novels “The Meridian,” “A Familiar Temple,” “Having the Secret of Joy,” and the poetry collections “Horses Make the Landscape More Beautiful” and “Bring An Arrow Out of the Heart.”
Early life and education
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children from farmer parents Minnie and Willie. At the age of four, she was registered with East Putnam Consolidated. When she was eight, Walker was shot in the right eye after her brother hit her with a BB shell. Because her family did not have a car to take her to the hospital, she was permanently blinded in her right eye. It was this incident that inspired Walker to read and write.
As a teenager, Walker attended Butler Baker High School, the district’s only school open to black students. After graduating as a class valedictorian, she went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship. When her mentors were transferred there, and another teacher was fired, Walker accepted a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. I graduated from school in 1965.
career beginnings
Early in her final year at Sarah Lawrence, Walker became pregnant. The miscarriage that followed, as well as an episode of suicidal thoughts, became the inspiration for Walker’s first poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. The collection was released in 1968.
After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, Walker worked for the New York City Department of Social Welfare. She then returned to the South, where she began working for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, based in Jackson, Mississippi. Additionally, Walker worked as a consultant for the Mississippi Children’s Friends program Head Start. Later, she started writing residencies at Jackson State University and Tugalo College. Walker became the editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine in the early 1970s.
first novels
Walker released her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970; It focuses on the life of the titular character, an abusive and useless farmer, as well as his wife, son, and granddaughter. In 1976, Walker published her second novel, Meridian, which focused on Southern activists during the civil rights movement. Many of the book’s events are similar to Walker’s personal experiences.
“Violet”
It was Walker’s third novel, 1982’s The Color Purple, which became her most famous work. The book chronicles the journey of Seely, a poor African American teenager living in the American South at the turn of the 20th century. All the while, she was forced to face the ravages of racism and patriarchy. A bestseller, The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. Furthermore, it was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Later, in 2005, “The Color Purple” became a Broadway musical.
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more business
Walker has published several other novels since The Color Purple, as well as collections of short stories, works of non-fiction, and collections of poetry. Among her notable novels are 1989’s A Familiar Temple and 1992’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. The latter focuses on the life of Tashi, who was a minor character in The Color Purple. Walker’s non-fiction books included “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Prose,” “Warrior Signs,” “We Are the People We’ve Been Waiting For,” and “Overcoming the Silence.” Her notable 2000 short story collections include The Road Forward With a Broken Heart, which was based on her own life experiences. Walker’s poetry collections include “Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems”; “Absolute confidence in the good of the earth”; “Hard times call for angry dance”; and “Extracting the arrow from the heart.”
Activity
Walker is as famous for her writing as for her activism. She attributes her early work in the civil rights movement to Martin Luther King, Jr., whom she met when she was a student at Spelman College. Walker participated in the 1963 rally in Washington, and later volunteered to help black voters in Mississippi and Georgia register to vote. She was also an outspoken advocate for women of color, coining the word “feminist” to denote black feminism. Walker is a longtime patron of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Among her other activist endeavors, Walker traveled to Gaza with 60 other activists to urge Israel and Egypt to open their borders with Gaza. She returned in 2011 to participate in the Gaza flotilla, which was designed to break the Israeli naval blockade.
anti-Semitism
Walker has been accused of anti-Semitism on a number of occasions. Notably, she paid tribute to British conspiracy theorist David Ike, whose books perpetuate anti-Semitic ideas. Walker also published a poem called Our (Frightening) Duty to Study the Talmud, which contained clearly anti-Semitic lines. Furthermore, it prevented the publication of “The Color Violet” in Hebrew.
personal life
In 1967, Walker married civil rights attorney Melvin Leventhal in New York City. They then moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they became the state’s first legally engaged interracial couple. Locker and Leventhal had a daughter named Rebecca. They eventually divorced in 1976. Next, Walker moved to Northern California, where she co-founded the women’s publishing company Wild Tree Press with Robert L. Allen.
Real estate
In the mid-1990s, Alice Walker bought a house in Berkeley, California. She sold this home in 2016 for $2.65 million. The buyer was the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
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