the literary and artistic contributions of African-
American women. She had become particularly
aware of the need for such tools during her suc-
cessful literary recovery of foremother ZORA NEALE
HURSTON. Ultimately, however, Walker’s model is
less a means for judging the value of black wom-
en’s art than it is a framework for imagining the
black female subject in the process of achiev-
ing wholeness. The womanist model is exhibited
through Walker’s fiction, particularly in her nov-
els from the award-winning The Color Purple for-
ward. Walker and other black women artists have
had to confront the “racial and gender mountain,”
and in her 30-plus years of writing for publication,
Walker has often been plagued by criticism for the
manner in which she has chosen to explore the so-
cial and cultural roots of women’s oppression.
Walker has received numerous awards, grants,
and fellowships. These include a Pulitzer Prize
(the first by an African American for fiction) and
an American Book Award for The Color Purple,
the Lillian Smith Award for her poetry, the Rich-
ard and Hinda Rosenthal Award for her short
stories, a Langston Hughes Award, a National En-
dowment for the Arts grant, a Radcliffe Institute
fellowship, a PEN West Freedom to Write award,
a Guggenheim grant, and several others. Walker
is also cofounder of Wild Trees Press (1984 and
1988). Walker continues her social and political
activism to this day—though it has taken on a
more international scope that parallels her per-
sonal spiritual development and her belief in the
oneness of the universe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dieke, Ikenna, ed. Critical Essays on Alice Walker.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah,
eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and
Present. Amistad Literary Series. New York: Amis-
tad, 1993.
Lauret, Maria. Alice Walker. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000.
Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York:
Twayne, 1992.
Lovalerie KingWalker, David (1785–1830)
Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker was
the son of a slave father, who died before Walker
was born, and a free mother; at birth, he inher-
ited the free status of his mother, who reared him.
Abhorring slavery, the slave-holding South, and
its “hypocritical slaveholders,” Walker relocated to
Boston, “where the previously illiterate and soon-
to-become key figure in the abolitionist move-
ment” (Aptheker 1965, 33) learned to read and
write, became a clothing merchant, and married.
As a leader in Boston’s black community, Walker
was a member of the Massachusetts General Col-
ored Association and an agent of and contributor
to Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper,
edited by John B. Russwurm and Samuel E. Cor-
nish, which was first published on March 16, 1727.
Walker was also a subscriber to a freedom fund for
poet GEORGE MOSES HORTON.
Walker wrote, according to RICHARD BARKSDALE
and Keneth Kinnamon, “the most radical of the
early written protests against the Black man’s con-
dition in America” (151), Walker’s Appeal in Four
Articles, together with a Preamble, to the Coloured
Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very
Expressly to Those of the United States of America,
Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September
28, 1829, which, as the title reveals, he structured
after the Constitution of the United States. By the
time of Walker’s death, he had overseen the publi-
cation of the second and third editions of his Ap-
peal, in which his voice became progressively more
militant and radical. The preamble and four articles
confirm Lerone Bennett’s contention that Walker
was a “firebell that wouldn’t stop ringing” (69).
Walker, in the preamble, developed his funda-
mental thesis around his “unshaken conviction”
that blacks were “the most degraded, wretched,
and abject set of beings that ever lived since the
world began” (1). Therefore, his purpose in writ-
ing his Appeal was “to awaken in the hearts of
my afflicted, degraded, and slumbering brethren,
a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting
our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican
Land of Liberty!” (2). Walker identified four main
sources, “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of
Slavery,” “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of526 Walker, David