Alice Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944, is a poet, novelist, and short-story writer whose graphic depiction of the lives of southern blacks has established her as one of the most promising of younger writers. Born into a sharecropper family, she took part in the civil rights movement of the 1960s while in college at Spelman in Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from Sarah Lawerence College in 1965. She has been a writer-in-residence and teacher at institutions including Wellesley College and Brandeis University since 1968. Through her writing, she has ventured into the problems of our society dealing with racism and sexism. Walker shows strong and sympathetic women characters in her writing, while portraying the black man in stereotyped ways of brutal and sexist. Although critics classify her wiring as feministic, Walker would rather attribute her focus on the struggle of black women as "womanism."

Alice Walker is a feminist and she understands the circumstances that force a women into an anti-man situation. Her many women characters live as examples of man's inhumanity to women, but Alice Walker is too much of an artist to write a perfect political statement. She uses her feminist impulse to allow her characters to ebb and flow as the story develops. The men in her stories also lead miserable lives, but like their women they come to terms with what life has to bring and accept the consequences, and eventually, the women turn from rage to acceptance as well. Walker lets the bitterness of her characters become the hard-won wisdom, and these characters come to life as real human beings. She has a strong individual voice and vision all of her own.

Walker's experiences in the civil rights movement formed the basis for two of her novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and Meridian (1976), as well as for In Love and Trouble (1973), and her collection of stories about black women. Walker has also published several volumes of poetry, including Once (1968), Revolutionary Petunias (1973), and Good Night Willie Lee. Her novel The Color Purple (1982; film, 1985) won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1983. The Temple of My Familiar, a novel, was published in 1989.

"The Abortion"