ATLANTA
Even from a young age, author Alice Walker was keeping a record.
The Georgia native began storing her notebooks, journals and photos as a teenager, creating a personal archive spanning 40 years that paints a vivid picture of her development as a writer. The yellowing letters and fading photographs tell the story of a woman who found a mentor in activist and writer Howard Zinn, doodled short stories in between her college class notes, and was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction writing.
Now, that catalog is open to the public at Emory University in Atlanta, where Walker is placing her archive.
“My father taught me that you have to keep records, because, if you don’t, it can be said nothing happened,” Walker said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press as she wandered through an exhibit of her belongings. “I took that to heart,” she added.
The exhibit opened Thursday with a two-day symposium featuring feminist Gloria Steinem and Zinn, among others, discussing the impact of Walker’s writing. Her work has spotlighted the struggle of Southern Blacks, particularly women, and she has traveled the globe speaking out for human rights.
The collection at Emory starts with a picture of Walker at age 6 taken where she grew up in rural Eatonton, Ga., before the accident two years later that made her blind in one eye. And it travels through her days at Spelman College in Atlanta and Sarah Lawrence College in New York, her time as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, her marriage to a white Jewish attorney, and her work on “The Color Purple,” for which she won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1983.
