Humanities 2
Ms. Finley
Boston Green Academy


Submit your work via e-mail to rfinley@bostongreenacademy.org
Assigned: March 20, 2014
Due: Monday, March 24, 2014


EXTENSION ACTIVITY
Directions:
1) Part 1: C.A.T.C.H. Annotate: Read and annotate the following biography of Alice Walker, using the CATCH technique. Your annotations should show evidence of your internal ‘conversation with the text’.
2) Part 2: Summarize: On the attached sheet of paper, summarize the biography using the GIST strategy.

EXTRA CREDIT: Add annotations to the Poetry Genius page and earn 1 full homework grade (for every 2 annotations)!

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Part 1: Alice Walker, Biography

Introduction
Author Alice Walker had been an acclaimed poet, short story writer, and novelist since the late 1960s, long before her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 book The Color Purple and its 1985 film adaptation stirred emotions for its brutal portrayal of domestic violence. Prior to and since that novel captured attention and created controversy for its negative portrayal of the main African American male character, Walker has not skirted complex and painful topics. Her earliest volume of poetry was written in the immediate aftermath of an abortion, and her second novel, Meridian, was a tale spun about the heart of the civil rights movement. After The Color Purple she confronted the practice of female genital mutilation in the 1992 novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, and in 1998 she expanded on subject of female sexual repression in By the Light of My Father's Smile. Her works have mainly centered on experiences of female African Americans from the rural south and show a distinctly feminist approach, but they have a wide appeal across racial, cultural, and gender lines. She is known for her feminist philosophy, although she prefers to call herself a "womanist," a term she coined to more fully express her appreciation of her own gender. In addition to her literary work, Walker has been an instructor and prolific lecturer and is a prominent intellectual who holds concern for an array of social causes.

Early Life
Alice Walker was born Alice Malsenior Walker in the rural town on Eatonton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the youngest of eight children of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. Her mother also held a part-time job as a maid, in addition to sewing all of the family's clothing and linens and doing all the canning and preserves to see them through the winter. In addition to their hard work, her parents enriched their family by spinning stories, which Walker began to record as a child. In 1952, however, at the age of eight, she experienced a turning point. A tomboy who enjoyed playing outside with her brothers, Walker was accidentally shot in the right eye by one of their BB guns. It left her blind in that eye, and an unsightly mass of scar tissue formed over top, causing her to become withdrawn. For six years, she disliked raising her head because she was embarrassed of her appearance. During this period, she began keenly observing the world around her and started to read more and write her own poems. To gain solitude from the family of ten that shared a tiny home, she would take walks in the field.
In 1958, at age 14, Walker went to visit her brother Bill in Boston, Massachusetts, and he took her to have the scar tissue on her eye removed. As she wrote in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, "Almost immediately I became a different person from the girl who does not raise her head. Or so I think. Now that I've raised my head I win the boyfriend of my dreams. Now that I've raised my head I have plenty of friends. Now that I've raised my head classwork comes from my lips as faultlessly as Easter speeches did, and I leave high school as valedictorian, most popular student, and queen, hardly believing my luck." In addition, her mother saved her paltry earnings from her work as a domestic to buy her daughter a sewing machine, to make a prom dress; a suitcase, so that she could travel if she liked; and a typewriter with a typing table. Ironically, Walker's disability, which once thrust her into a shell, helped her win a scholarship for handicapped students to Atlanta's Spelman College, the oldest college for African American women in the country. Her neighbors raised the $75 she needed for bus fare, and she started classes in 1961.

While still in high school, Walker had become exposed to the civil rights struggle and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., thanks to television. At college she expanded her participation in the movement, making the acquaintance of members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) and attending the famous March on Washington, in addition to local protests in Atlanta. However, she found Spelman to be too confining, so she accepted a scholarship at the exclusive Sarah Lawrence College in New York City after her sophomore year. Before her senior year, she spent the summer of 1964 in Africa on a fellowship, where she "was often seen more as a peculiar kind of American, not as a returning daughter," as Gloria Steinem wrote in Ms., "and she also felt the suffering of women and the condescension of many men." When Walker came back, she was pregnant. She tried to find someone to perform an abortion, but she had no luck. Distraught, she considered suicide, but a friend managed to get her an appointment. The week after the procedure, Walker churned out a stream of poetry and submitted the works to a teacher, the famed poet Muriel Rukeyser. They dealt with her experience in Africa, suicide, love, and civil rights. Rukeyser, in turn, forwarded them to her agent at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishers, which accepted them that same year. They were not published, however, until 1968, under the title Once.

Early Writings
In the meantime, Walker published her first piece, the short story "To Hell With Dying," about young girl devoted to her friendship with an elderly man. It was much later issued as a children's book. In 1965 Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence with her bachelor of arts degree and went to work in New York City's Welfare Department, but she found the job odious. She quit after four months and moved back to Georgia, working with voter registration in Liberty County. In 1966 she received her first writing fellowship and moved to Mississippi to be near the core of the civil rights movement. There, she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a white civil rights lawyer, and the two moved to New York City the following year. They were married on March 17, 1967, and later that year, they moved back to Mississippi, where Walker worked as a as a black literature consultant for Friends of the Children of Mississippi, a Head Start program. At that time, it was against the law for African Americans and white people to reside in the same house. Walker and her husband were the first legally married mixed-race couple in Jackson, and they fought racism together.

Walker from 1968 to 1969 was a writer in residence at Jackson State College and then in 1970 moved to Tougaloo State College. Also in 1970, her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published. In 1972 Walker moved to Massachusetts with her young daughter, Rebecca, while her husband remained in Mississippi. She taught at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. While she was there, in 1973 she saw her breakthrough with the publication of the collection Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. The largely autobiographical work won the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council and was nominated for the National Book Award. Also in 1973, she collected 13 short stories, most of them previously published, as In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In 1974 Walker published a biography of Langston Hughes for children, and she and Leventhal moved back to New York to live in Brooklyn. There, she was a contributing editor for the fledgling feminist magazine Ms. and published her second novel, Meridian, about civil rights. Overall, it won favorable reviews. She and Leventhal divorced in 1976 and shared custody of daughter Rebecca. In 1977 Walker received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and fellowships from the McDowell Colony and Guggenheim Foundation. She visited Cuba with other African American writers, artists, and musicians and in 1979 she published another book of poetry, titled Goodnight, Willie Lee then, began working on The Color Purple.


(following is the text from the accompanying worksheets)



Name: ________________________________ Date: _______

Getting the “Gist” WORKSHEET

After each heading, select one or four key facts/words/phrases from the biography that BEST help you understand and summarize what is going on in the text as a whole.

1. Fill out the 5Ws and H.
Who:
What:
Where:
When:
Why:
How:
2. Key Facts/Word/Phrase Brainstorm
Introduction:
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Early Life:
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Early Writings:
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3. Reflection

What do you think is the main idea of the biography? Why do you think that?
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What are THREE key words/phrases that BEST support the main idea?
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Now, use your annotations and GIST list to write an accurate and concise summary of Alice Walker’s biography.
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