SOURCE: “Alice Walker: Her Own Woman,” in The Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 76, No. 49, February 3, 1984, pp. B1, B7.

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.

Alice Walker is currently our most celebrated woman writer. Within the past few months, she has been featured and photographed in such diverse mass media as Vanity Fair, People, and the New York Times Magazine. Her most recent novel, The Color Purple, has been a consistent best seller and received the double honor of the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Her part in the rediscovery of black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston, and the long-overdue attention paid to black women writers within the past few years, have undoubtedly contributed to her prominence. Her latest book, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, a...