Alice Walker: a life story worth reading

The book's interest is in no small measure due to the fact that Walker has lived a rather remarkable life. Yet White deserves credit for an incredible job of detailing the arc of her subject's years without turning minute details into landmark achievement after landmark achievement.

Born in Georgia into what she has referred to as the "agrarian peasantry," Walker was the eighth child of sharecropping parents less than a generation removed from slavery. At age 8, she lost the sight in her right eye after being accidentally shot with a BB gun by one of her brothers. This event led to her lifelong interest in tragedy and perseverance, frequent leitmotifs in her fiction.

As a teenager, Walker excelled in a still-segregated Southern school system, graduating as valedictorian from her rural high school before heading to Spelman College, the all-black, all-female school as famous for its topnotch education as for its elitism. She withdrew after just 2 years, in part because of the dismissal of Howard Zinn, a young radical, pro-civil rights historian who would go on to become one of the nation's most respected scholars.

With the help of a patron, Walker finished her schooling, at Sarah Lawrence College. Shortly thereafter, at the age of 25, she published her first collection of poetry, "Once." By the time she published her first novel, "The Third Life of Grange Copeland," in 1970, she was a respected story writer and poet. She had trailblazed in other ways as well, marrying a Jewish civil rights attorney in 1967 and moving to Mississippi to fight for equal rights for blacks. Given that most Southern states still had laws barring interracial unions, it was a particularly bold move on the part of Walker and her husband to dive headfirst into battleground territory.