Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000

Alice Walker, Valerie Boyd

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781476773162
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476773179
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize­–winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual.

For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feeling as a woman, a writer, an African American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.

In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulizter Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this “revelation, a road map, and a gift to us all” (Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage) offers rare insight into a literary legend.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Part One: Marriage, Movement, and Mississippi / The 1960s
• Part Two: The Nature of This Flower is to Bloom / The 1970s
• Part Three: Be Nobody’s Darling / The 1980s
• Part Four: You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down / The 1990s
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright