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Alice Walker: Suggested Reading
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by Erik Bledsoe
East Tennessee State University
Johnson City, Tennessee
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The following titles may be of interest to those studying the works of Alice Walker.
Titles
Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. Modern Critical Views Series 2. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1989.
The first collection of critical essays devoted exclusively to Walker.
_____. Alice Walker's "The Color Purple." Modern Critical Interpretations Series. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.
Contains a dozen previously published essays or excerpts from books, published from 1988 to 1998. Four of the essays consider the influence of Zora Neale Hurston on the novel. Also strongly represented are efforts to read the novel in terms of Walker's womanist philosophy. Most of the essays approach her work from at least a generally feminist perspective.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Amistad Literary Series. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Yet another collection of critical essays. This one includes contemporaneous reviews of Walker's novels through Possessing the Secret of Joy. The 16 essays included primarily focus upon racial issues in her work, rather than on the feminist perspective of the second Bloom collection above. Also includes commentary upon Walker's poetry. A wide-ranging anthology, the collection includes two seminal, early (1979 and 1980) evaluations of Walker by Mary Helen Washington and Barbara Christian that predate the post-Color Purple explosion of critical interest.
Lauret, Maria. Alice Walker. Modern Novelists Series. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Considers all of Walker's novels, including a brief postscript on By the Light of My Father's Smile. Draws heavily upon Walker's essays to establish the philosophical perspective from which she writes. Although the book is well researched and provides helpful readings of the novels, the author's overuse of cliches and other stylistic blemishes sometimes makes the book frustrating to read.
O'Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973.
Contains an early interview with Walker where she speaks very openly about her life, especially her abortion while in college, and her commitment "to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women."
Walker, Rebecca. Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. New York: Riverhead Books, 2000.
The daughter of Alice Walker writes a memoir about growing up as a child of a racially mixed marriage with activist parents and a very famous mother.
Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. Twayne's United States Authors Series, no. 596. New York: Twayne, 1992.
A typical Twayne series introduction to Walker's body of work.
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