Research Guide to American Literature

conformity to social norms. Unable to reconcile her political commitments with
those of the institution, Walker withdrew from Spelman, a move she attributes
to feeling “alienated by the naiveté and passiveness of the middle-class milieu.”
Despite this, she developed a lasting relationship with professors and historians
Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd. With the help of Lynd, Walker transferred
to the elite (then) women’s college Sarah Lawrence in 1964, from which she
graduated in 1966.
In 1967 Walker married civil rights attorney Melvyn (Mel) Rosenman
Leventhal, whom she met while working with the Student Nonviolent Coordi-
nating Committee (SNCC) in Jackson, Mississippi. Leventhal also worked with
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Their union produced a daughter, Rebecca
Grant Leventhal (born 1969), and was tested by bigotry. Walker and Leventhal
remained strong in the midst of the tensions surrounding interracial couples, and
the general distrust of white people in the Civil Rights Movement. Together, they
lived in Jackson for several years before moving to the Cambridge, Massachusetts,
area; they divorced in 1977. Walker did not return to the South for some twenty
years, when she was honored as a speaker at Spelman College.
A feminist author-activist, Walker claims Langston Hughes as her “literary
father” and Zora Neale Hurston as a model for her work. It was Walker, in fact,
who single-handedly resuscitated Hurston’s memory and legacy as a major figure
of the Harlem Renaissance. Walker’s commitment to black life and experience
in America is clear as both she and her work are rooted in Southern culture. It
is through Walker’s fiction that her passion about the suffering of black people
is evident. Still, Walker is often critiqued by black scholars as having a primarily
feminist perspective which, at times, puts her at odds with racial issues. She was
among the first writers to integrate the predominantly white, feminist publica-
tion Ms. magazine, where she worked as a contributing editor. In addition to her
editorial duties, Walker wrote several poems and essays for Ms. and American
Scholar. Walker’s other professional appointments included writer-in-residence
at Jackson State College and lecturer at Wellesley College and the University of
Massachusetts, Boston.
Walker’s publications are an impressive body of essays, poems, and novels.
Her first published work of fiction, “To Hell with Dying” (1967), chronicles the
life of Mr. Sweet and the two children who keep him alive. This story, initially
included in a collection edited by Langston Hughes, The Best Short Stories by
Negro Writers, was published as a children’s book in 1988. Walker’s other works
of children’s literature include Langston Hughes: American Poet (1974), Finding the
Green Stone (1991), and Why War Is Never a Good Idea (2007). Many of her essays
address black nationalism and its connection to the Civil Rights Movement.
Walker’s essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” won first
prize for publication in the fall 1967 issue of American Scholar. In Love & Trouble:
Stories of Black Women (1973), Walker’s debut short-story collection, includes “Her
Sweet Jerome” and “Everyday Use,” her most widely anthologized and taught
story. Both offer a veiled critique of the black nationalist movement as a platform
for elevating “cultured” blacks over less-educated ones, and an explicit valoriza-
tion of Southern folk through her characters. (See Barbara Christian’s essay “The

Alice Walker