Born and raised in a poor community in the rural South, Alice Malsenior Walker may have seemed an unlikely candidate to become such a significant writer in the twentieth century. Yet it was her experiences among poor black folk, her ear for their language, and her respect for their dignity, that gave her the material and the reason for her writing. She was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child in a family of sharecroppers. When she was eight, one of her brothers accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB gun. The resulting scar left her shaken and shy, and she began to spend more time alone, reading.

Walker graduated at the top of her high school class, earning a scholarship to Spelman College, a college in Atlanta for African-American women. After two and a half years there, she transferred to Sarah...