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Throughout time there have been writers and authors who have influenced and changed regions, people and their ways of life. The American South has been a place of a conflict between races and equality since the days of the first settlers. Even after the Civil War, the American South was still a place full of inequality, hatred and conflict. During these times in the early and mid 20th century many African Americans did whatever they could to influence and change their rights as supposed free Americans. Many African Americans did this through their writings and stories of the hard times in the South for African Americans. One of the most influential writers of this time and still today for African Americans and women is Alice Walker. Walker was also a major contributor to the Civil Rights movement in America. Walker devoted her life to her work and the writings of African American women and their experiences in the South. Walker is most famous for her critically acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize novel The Color Purple.
Alice Walker was born in 1944 to a sharecropping family in Eatonton, Georgia, where growing up as an African American in the South was anything but easy. Walker was the youngest out of eight children. Walker’s childhood was very difficult, where she dealt with many problems of inequality, long and hot days of working in the fields and the feelings of being the young outcast of the family. Walker was lost and confused and looking for any kind of way out the life she was born to. Walker talked about her childhood life in rural Georgia and how much she hated it “I can recall that I hated it, generally. The hard work in the fields, the shabby houses, the evil greedy men who worked my father to death and almost broke the courage of that strong woman, my mother (Winchell, 4). A major part in the Walker’s escape of the sharecropping life was due to Walker’s mother, Minnie Lou Walker knew the only way for her children to get out the life they were living...