45- ] American Literature - Maya Angelou

45- ] American Literature 

Maya Angelou

1928–2014 

Maya Angelou born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American memoirist, popular poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. American poet, memoirist, and actress whose several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, Angelou was recognized “as a spokesperson for… all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.” She served on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary degrees before her death.

Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), deals with her early years in Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her brother and paternal grandmother. In one of its most evocative (and controversial) moments, Angelou describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was just seven years old. When the man was murdered by her uncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking. Angelou remained mute for five years, but developed a love for language. She read Black authors like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. When Angelou was twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated African American woman, finally got her to speak again. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou recalled in her children’s book Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship (1986), emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the nature of and importance of education, and instilled in her a love of poetry. Angelou graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.

Angelou attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and took lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. When Angelou, just seventeen, graduated from high school and gave birth to a son, Guy, she began to work as the first African American and first female street car conductor in San Francisco. As she explained in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas (1976), the third of her autobiographies, she also “worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic’s shop, taking the paint off cars with my hands.” Angelou married a white ex-sailor, Tosh Angelos, in 1950. After they separated, Angelou continued her study of dance in New York City, returning to San Francisco to sing in the Purple Onion cabaret and garnering the attention of talent scouts. From 1954 to 1955, she was a member of the cast of a touring production of Porgy and Bess. During the late 1950s, Angelou sang in West Coast and Hawaiian nightclubs, before returning to New York to continue her stage career.

Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s and met James Baldwin and other important writers. It was during this time that Angelou had the opportunity to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak. Inspired by his message, she decided to become a part of the struggle for civil rights. She was offered a position as the northern coordinator for Dr. King’s SCLC. Following her work for Dr. King, Angelou moved to Cairo with her son, and, in 1962, to Ghana in West Africa. She worked as a freelance writer and was a feature editor at the African Review. When Angelou returned to the United States in the mid-1960s, she was encouraged by author James Baldwin and Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, to write an autobiography. Initially, Angelou declined the offers, but eventually changed her mind and wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book chronicles Angelou’s childhood and ends with the birth of her son. It won immediate success and was nominated for a National Book Award.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Angelou’s six autobiographies. It is widely taught in schools, though it has faced controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuse and violence. Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre’s relationship with truth and memory. Though her books are episodic and tightly-crafted, the events seldom follow a strict chronology and are arranged to emphasize themes. Other volumes include Gather Together in My Name (1974), which begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother; Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas, an account of her tour in Europe and Africa with Porgy and Bess; The Heart of a Woman (1981), a description of Angelou’s acting and writing career in New York and her work for the civil rights movement; and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), which recounts Angelou’s travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her son, to America.

It took Angelou fifteen years to write the final volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung up to Heaven (2002). The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned from Ghana in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother’s table and began to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1968. Angelou hesitated so long to start the book and took so long to finish it, she told Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service interviewer Sherryl Connelly, because so many painful things happened to her, and to the entire African-American community, in those four years. “I didn’t know how to write it,” she said. “I didn’t see how the assassination of Malcolm [X], the Watts riot, the breakup of a love affair, then [the assassination of Dr.] Martin [Luther] King [Jr.], how I could get all that loose with something uplifting in it.” A Song Flung up to Heaven deals forthrightly with these events, and “the poignant beauty of Angelou’s writing enhances rather than masks the candor with which she addresses the racial crisis through which America was passing,” Wayne A. Holst wrote in Christian Century.

Angelou was also a prolific and widely-read poet, and her poetry has often been lauded more for its depictions of Black beauty, the strength of women, and the human spirit; criticizing the Vietnam War; demanding social justice for all—than for its poetic virtue. Yet Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie, which was published in 1971, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. According to Carol Neubauer in Southern Women Writers, “the first twenty poems describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss.” In other poems, “Angelou turns her attention to the lives of black people in America from the time of slavery to the rebellious 1960s. Her themes deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic survival.”

As Angelou wrote her autobiographies and poems, she continued her career in film and television. She was the first Black woman to have a screenplay (Georgia, Georgia) produced in 1972. She was honored with a nomination for an Emmy award for her performance in Roots in 1977. In 1979, Angelou helped adapt her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for a television movie of the same name. Angelou wrote the poetry for the 1993 film Poetic Justice and played the role of Aunt June. She also played Lelia Mae in the 1993 television film There Are No Children Here and appeared as Anna in the feature film How to Make an American Quilt in 1995.

One source of Angelou’s fame in the early 1990s was President Bill Clinton’s invitation to write and read an inaugural poem. Americans all across the country watched as she read “On the Pulse of Morning,” which begins “A Rock, a River, a Tree” and calls for peace, racial and religious harmony, and social justice for people of different origins, incomes, genders, and sexual orientations. It recalls the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech as it urges America to “Give birth again / To the Dream” of equality. Angelou challenged the new administration and all Americans to work together for progress: “Here, on the pulse of this new day, / You may have the grace to look up and out / And into your sister’s eyes, and into / Your brother’s face, your country /And say simply / Very simply / With hope—Good morning.”

During the early 1990s, Angelou wrote several books for children, including Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993), which also featured the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His Magic (1996), both collaborations with the photographer Margaret Courtney-Clark. Angelou’s poetry collections include The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994) and Phenomenal Woman (1995), a collection of four poems that takes its title from a poem which originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1978. The poem’s narrator describes the physical and spiritual characteristics and qualities that make her attractive. Angelou also wrote occasional poems, including A Brave Startling Truth (1995), which commemorated the founding of the United Nations, and Amazing Peace (2005), a poem written for the White House Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

Angelou published multiple collections of essays. Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) contains declarations, complaints, memories, opinions, and advice on subjects ranging from faith to jealousy. Genevieve Stuttaford, writing in Publishers Weekly, described the essays as “quietly inspirational pieces.” Anne Whitehouse of the New York Times Book Review observed that the book would “appeal to readers in search of clear messages with easily digested meanings.” Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997) is the sister volume, a book of “candid and lovingly crafted homilies” to “sensuality, beauty, and black women” said Donna Seaman in Booklist. Letter to my Daughter was published in 2008.

Angelou’s poetry often benefited from her performance of it, and during her lifetime Angelou recited her poems before spellbound crowds. Indeed, Angelou’s poetry can also be traced to African-American oral traditions like slave and work songs, especially in her use of personal narrative and emphasis on individual responses to hardship, oppression and loss. In addition to examining individual experience, Angelou’s poems often respond to matters like race and sex on a larger social and psychological scale. Describing her work to George Plimpton, Angelou said, “Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning ‘we.’ And what a responsibility. Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me.”

In 2013 she was the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community. She died in 2014 at the age of 86.

Works

Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's third autobiography Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked the first time a well-known African-American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life. Her books "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In her fifth autobiography, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Angelou tells about her return to Ghana searching for the past of her tribe. She published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, at the age of 85. Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first", with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise. Angelou wrote five collections of essays, which writer Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with autobiographical texts". Angelou used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House; he retired in 2011 and has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors." Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers."

Angelou's long and extensive career also included poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking. She was a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by U.S. president Bill Clinton to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his inauguration in 1993.

Angelou's successful acting career included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, including her appearance in the television mini-series Roots in 1977. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a Black woman to be produced, and she was the first African-American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.

Chronology of autobiographies

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969): Up to 1944 (age 17) , Gather Together in My Name (1974): 1944–48 , Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976): 1949–55 , The Heart of a Woman (1981): 1957–62 , All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986): 1962–65 , A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002): 1965–68 , Mom & Me & Mom (2013): overview

Poetry

Angelou is best known for her seven autobiographies, but she was also a prolific and successful poet. She was called "the black woman's poet laureate", and her poems have been called the anthems of African Americans.[143] Angelou studied and began writing poetry at a young age, and used poetry and other great literature to cope with her rape as a young girl, as described in Caged Bird. According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, literature also affected Angelou's sensibilities as the poet and writer she became, especially the "liberating discourse that would evolve in her own poetic canon".

Many critics consider Angelou's autobiographies more important than her poetry. Although all her books have been bestsellers, her poetry has not been perceived to be as serious as her prose and has been understudied. Her poems were more interesting when she recited and performed them, and many critics emphasized the public aspect of her poetry. Angelou's lack of critical acclaim has been attributed to both the public nature of many of her poems and to Angelou's popular success, and to critics' preferences for poetry as a written form rather than a verbal, performed one. Zofia Burr has countered Angelou's critics by condemning them for not taking into account Angelou's larger purposes in her writing: "to be representative rather than individual, authoritative rather than confessional".

In the view of Harold Bloom, Professor of Literature (Yale University and New York University) and literary critic:

Her poetry has a large public, but very little critical esteem. It is, in every sense, "popular poetry," and makes no formal or cognitive demands upon the reader. Of Angelou's sincerity, good-will towards all, and personal vitality, there can be no doubt. She is professionally an inspirational writer, of the self-help variety, which perhaps places her beyond criticism. [...] Angelou seems best at ballads, the most traditional kind of popular poetry. The function of such work is necessarily social rather than aesthetic, particularly in an era totally dominated by visual media. One has to be grateful for the benignity, humor, and whole-heartedness of Angelou's project, even if her autobiographical prose necessarily centers her achievement.

Style and genre in autobiographies

Main article: Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies

Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language has often resulted in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction. Angelou made a deliberate attempt in her books to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth", which parallels the conventions of much of African-American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of U.S. history, when as both Lupton and African-American scholar Crispin Sartwell put it, the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection. Scholar Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African-American autobiography, but claims that Angelou created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.

According to African-American literature scholar Pierre A. Walker, the challenge for much of the history of African-American literature was that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature before they could accomplish their political goals, which was why Angelou's editor Robert Loomis was able to dare her into writing Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art". Angelou acknowledged that she followed the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'". Scholar John McWhorter calls Angelou's books "tracts" that defend African-American culture and fight negative stereotypes. According to McWhorter, Angelou structured her books, which to him seem to be written more for children than for adults, to support her defense of Black culture. McWhorter sees Angelou as she depicts herself in her autobiographies "as a kind of stand-in figure for the Black American in Troubled Times". McWhorter views Angelou's works as dated, but recognizes that "she has helped to pave the way for contemporary black writers who are able to enjoy the luxury of being merely individuals, no longer representatives of the race, only themselves". Scholar Lynn Z. Bloom compares Angelou's works to the writings of Frederick Douglass, stating that both fulfilled the same purpose: to describe Black culture and to interpret it for their wider, white audiences.

According to scholar Sondra O'Neale, Angelou's poetry can be placed within the African-American oral tradition, and her prose "follows classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms". O'Neale states that Angelou avoided using a "monolithic Black language", and accomplished, through direct dialogue, what O'Neale calls a "more expected ghetto expressiveness". McWhorter finds both the language Angelou used in her autobiographies and the people she depicted unrealistic, resulting in a separation between her and her audience. As McWhorter states, "I have never read autobiographical writing where I had such a hard time summoning a sense of how the subject talks, or a sense of who the subject really is". McWhorter asserts, for example, that key figures in Angelou's books, like herself, her son Guy, and mother Vivian do not speak as one would expect, and that their speech is "cleaned up" for her readers. Guy, for example, represents the young Black male, while Vivian represents the idealized mother figure, and the stiff language they use, as well as the language in Angelou's text, is intended to prove that Blacks can use standard English competently.

McWhorter recognizes that much of the reason for Angelou's style was the "apologetic" nature of her writing. When Angelou wrote Caged Bird at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature at the time was "organic unity", and one of her goals was to create a book that satisfied that criterion. The events in her books were episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements did not follow a strict chronology. Instead, they were placed to emphasize the themes of her books, which include racism, identity, family, and travel. English literature scholar Valerie Sayers has asserted that "Angelou's poetry and prose are similar". They both rely on her "direct voice", which alternates steady rhythms with syncopated patterns and uses similes and metaphors (e.g., the caged bird). According to Hagen, Angelou's works were influenced by both conventional literary and the oral traditions of the African-American community. For example, she referenced more than 100 literary characters throughout her books and poetry. In addition, she used the elements of blues music, including the act of testimony when speaking of one's life and struggles, ironic understatement, and the use of natural metaphors, rhythms, and intonations.[183] Angelou, instead of depending upon plot, used personal and historical events to shape her books.

Works by Maya Angelou

Albums

Miss Calypso

Autobiographies 

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Gather Together in My Name Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas The Heart of a Woman All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes A Song Flung Up to Heaven Mom & Me & Mom Themes

Poetry

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I DiiieOh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well And Still I Rise Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? Now Sheba Sings the Song I Shall Not Be Moved "On the Pulse of Morning" The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women" A Brave and Startling Truth" Celebrations, Rituals of Peace and Prayer Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me" We Had Him" Life Doesn't Frighten Me

Essays

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now Even the Stars Look Lonesome Letter to My Daughter

Cookbooks

Hallelujah! The Welcome Table Great Food, All Day Long

Screenplays

Georgia, Georgia (1972)Sister, Sister (1982)

Films

Down in the Delta (1998)

44- ] American Literature - Sinclair Lewis

44- ] American Literature 

Sinclair Lewis

1885–1951 

Sinclair Lewis, in full Harry Sinclair Lewis, (born Feb. 7, 1885, Sauk Centre, Minn., U.S.—died Jan. 10, 1951, near Rome, Italy), American novelist and social critic who punctured American complacency with his broadly drawn, widely popular satirical novels. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the first given to an American. He became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).

His works were critical of American capitalism and materialism during the interwar period. Lewis is respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."

Sinclair Lewis, 1914.

Lewis graduated from Yale University (1907) and was for a time a reporter and also worked as an editor for several publishers. His first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), attracted favourable criticism but few readers. At the same time he was writing with ever-increasing success for such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, but he never lost sight of his ambition to become a serious novelist. He undertook the writing of Main Street as a major effort, assuming that it would not bring him the ready rewards of magazine fiction. Yet its publication in 1920 made his literary reputation. Main Street is seen through the eyes of Carol Kennicott, an Eastern girl married to a Midwestern doctor who settles in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota (modeled on Lewis’ hometown of Sauk Centre). The power of the book derives from Lewis’ careful rendering of local speech, customs, and social amenities. The satire is double-edged—directed against both the townspeople and the superficial intellectualism that despises them. In the years following its publication, Main Street became not just a novel but the textbook on American provincialism.

In 1922 Lewis published Babbitt, a study of the complacent American whose individuality has been sucked out of him by Rotary clubs, business ideals, and general conformity. The name Babbitt passed into general usage to represent the optimistic, self-congratulatory, middle-aged businessman whose horizons were bounded by his village limits.

He followed this success with Arrowsmith (1925), a satiric study of the medical profession, with emphasis on the frustration of fine scientific ideals. His next important book, Elmer Gantry (1927), was an attack on the ignorant, gross, and predatory leaders who had crept into the Protestant church. Dodsworth (1929), concerning the experiences of a retired big businessman and his wife on a European tour, offered Lewis a chance to contrast American and European values and the very different temperaments of the man and his wife.

Lewis’ later books were not up to the standards of his work in the 1920s. It Can’t Happen Here (1935) dramatized the possibilities of a Fascist takeover of the United States. It was produced as a play by the Federal Theatre with 21 companies in 1936. Kingsblood Royal (1947) is a novel of race relations.

In his final years Lewis lived much of the time abroad. His reputation declined steadily after 1930. His two marriages (the second was to the political columnist Dorothy Thompson) ended in divorce, and he drank excessively.

Career

Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, writing fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. In the summer of 1908, Lewis worked as an editorial writer at a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa. He came to the Carmel-by-the-Sea writers' colony in September 1908, to work for the MacGowan sisters and to meet poet George Sterling in person. He stayed with roommate and friend, writer William Rose Benét at photographer Arnold Genthe's house that was close to the beach. Lewis and Benét left Carmel after six months. Lewis came to San Francisco where Sterling helped him get a job at the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Lewis would return to Carmel in the spring of 1910 and meet Jack London. That year he sold two story plots to London.

While working for newspapers and publishing houses he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. He also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latter's unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Sinclair Lewis's first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

Legacy

Compared to his contemporaries, Lewis's reputation suffered a precipitous decline among literary scholars throughout the 20th century.[40] Despite his enormous popularity during the 1920s, by the 21st century most of his works had been eclipsed in prominence by other writers with less commercial success during the same time period, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Since the 2010s there has been renewed interest in Lewis's work, in particular his 1935 dystopian satire It Can't Happen Here. In the aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election, It Can't Happen Here surged to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling books. Scholars have found parallels in his novels to the COVID-19 crisis, and to the rise of Donald Trump.

He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series.

Works

Novels

1912: Hike and the Aeroplane (juvenile, as Tom Graham) , 1914: Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man , 1915: The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life , 1917: The Job , 1917: The Innocents: A Story for Lovers , 1919: Free Air , Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, June 7, June 14 and 21, 1919 , 1920: Main Street , 1922: Babbitt , Excerpted in Hearst's International, October 1922 , 1925: Arrowsmith , 1926: Mantrap , Serialized in Collier's, February 20, March 20 and April 24, 1926 , 1927: Elmer Gantry , 1928: The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen

1929: Dodsworth , 1933: Ann Vickers , Serialized in Redbook, August, November and December 1932 , 1934: Work of Art , 1935: It Can't Happen Here , 1938: The Prodigal Parents , 1940: Bethel Merriday , 1943: Gideon Planish , 1945: Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives , Appeared in Cosmopolitan, July 1945. , 1947: Kingsblood Royal , 1949: The God-Seeker

1951: World So Wide (posthumous) , Babbitt, Mantrap and Cass Timberlane were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.

The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949)

Samuel J. Rogal edited The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949), a seven-volume set published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press. The first attempt to collect all of Lewis's short stories.

Volume 1 (June 1904 – January 1916)

Volume 2 (August 1916 – October 1917)

Volume 3 (January 1918 – February 1919)

Volume 4 (February 1919 – May 1921)

Volume 5 (August 1923 – April 1931)

Volume 6 (June 1931 – March 1941)

Volume 7 (September 1941 – May 1949)

Articles

1915: "Nature, Inc.", The Saturday Evening Post, October 2, 1915

1917: "For the Zelda Bunch", McClure's, October 1917

1918: "Spiritualist Vaudeville", Metropolitan Magazine, February 1918

1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Gasoline Gypsies", The Saturday Evening Post, December 20, 1919

1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Want a Lift?", The Saturday Evening Post, December 27, 1919

1920: "Adventures in Autobumming: The Great American Frying Pan", The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1920

Plays

1919: Hobohemia , 1934: Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts (with Lloyd Lewis) , 1936: It Can't Happen Here (with John C. Moffitt) , 1938: Angela Is Twenty-Two (with Fay Wray) , Adapted for the feature film This Is the Life (1944)

Screenplay

1943: Storm In the West (with Dore Schary – unproduced)

Poems

1907: "The Ultra-Modern", The Smart Set, July 1907 , 1907: "Dim Hours of Dusk", The Smart Set, August 1907 , 1907: "Disillusion", The Smart Set, December 1907 , 1909: "Summer in Winter", People's Magazine, February 1909 , 1912: "A Canticle of Great Lovers", Ainslee's Magazine, July 1912

Forewords , 1942: Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait (by Paxton Hibben; publisher: The Press of the Readers Club, NY NY) , Books 1915: Tennis As I Play It (ghostwritten for Maurice McLoughlin) , 1926: John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer , 1929: Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929 , 1935: Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis , 1952: From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930 (edited by Alfred Harcourt and Oliver Harrison) , 1953: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950 (edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville Cane) , 1962: I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories (edited by Mark Schorer) , 1962: Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (edited by Mark Schorer) , 1985: Selected Letters of Sinclair Lewis (edited by John J. Koblas and Dave Page) , 1997: If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Anthony Di Renzo) , 2000: Minnesota Diary, 1942–46 (edited by George Killough) , 2005: Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (edited by Sally E. Parry)

2005: The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Sally E. Parry)

43-] American Literature - Alice Walker

43- ] American Literature

Alice Walker 

Poet, essayist, and novelist Alice Walker was born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. The author of numerous books, she “is one of the country’s best-selling writers of literary fiction,” according to Renee Tawa in the Los Angeles Times. Walker is a feminist and vocal advocate for human rights, and she has earned critical and popular acclaim as a major American novelist and intellectual. Her literary reputation was secured with her Pulitzer Prize-winning third novel, The Color Purple (1982), which Steven Spielberg adapted into a popular film. Walker’s numerous poetry collections include Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems (2019), Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018), Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991), Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985), and Once (1968). Her many honors include the O. Henry Award, the National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute.

Upon the release of The Color Purple, critics sensed that Walker had created something special. “The Color Purple … could be the kind of popular and literary event that transforms an intense reputation into a national one,” according to Gloria Steinem of Ms. Walker “has succeeded,” as Andrea Ford noted in the Detroit Free Press, “in creating a jewel of a novel.” Peter S. Prescott presented a similar opinion in a Newsweek review: “The Color Purple is an American novel of permanent importance, that rare sort of book which (in Norman Mailer’s felicitous phrase) amounts to ‘a diversion in the fields of dread.’”

Jeanne Fox-Alston and Mel Watkins both found the appeal of The Color Purple in the synthesis of characters and themes found in Walker’s earlier works, that it brings together the best of the author’s literary production in one volume. Fox-Alston, in Chicago’s Tribune Books, remarked, “Celie, the main character in Walker’s third … novel, The Color Purple, is an amalgam of all those women [characters in Walker’s previous books]; she embodies both their desperation and, later, their faith.” Watkins stated in the New York Times Book Review, “Her previous books … have elicited praise for Miss Walker as a lavishly gifted writer. The Color Purple, while easily satisfying that claim, brings into sharper focus many of the diverse themes that threaded their way through her past work.”

Walker’s writing reflects her roots in Georgia, where Black vernacular was prominent and the stamp of slavery and oppression were still present. When she was eight, Walker was accidentally shot in the eye by a brother playing with his BB gun. Her parents, who were too poor to afford a car, could not take her to a doctor for several days. By that time, her wound was so bad that she had lost the use of her right eye. This handicap influenced her writer’s voice; she withdrew from others and became a meticulous observer of human relationships and interaction.

An excellent student, Walker was awarded a scholarship to Spelman College in 1961. The civil rights movement attracted her, and she became an activist. In 1963, she decided to continue her education at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she began to work seriously on writing poems, publishing several in a college journal. After graduation, she moved to Mississippi to teach and continue to engage in social activism, and she met and married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. The two became the only legally married interracial couple living in Jackson, Mississippi. After their divorce in 1976, Walker’s literary output increased.

Walker coined the term “Womanist” to describe her philosophical stance on the issue of gender. As a Womanist, she sees herself as someone who appreciates women’s culture and femininity. Her work often reflects this stance, as well as the universality of human experience. Walker’s central characters are almost always Black women; Walker, according to Steinem, “comes at universality through the path of an American black woman’s experience. … She speaks the female experience more powerfully for being able to pursue it across boundaries of race and class.” This universality is also noted by Fox-Alston, who remarked that Walker has a “reputation as a provocative writer who writes about blacks in particular, but all humanity in general.”

Walker is deeply invested in revealing the experiences of Black women. Thadious M. Davis, in his Dictionary of Literary Biography essay, commented: “Walker writes best of the social and personal drama in the lives of familiar people who struggle for survival of self in hostile environments. She has expressed a special concern with exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and the triumph of black women.”

Gloria Steinem pointed out that Meridian (1976), Walker’s second novel, “is often cited as the best novel of the civil rights movement, and is taught as part of some American history as well as literature courses.” In Everyday Use (1994), Barbara Christian found the title story—first published in Walker’s collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)—to be “pivotal” to all of Walker’s work in its evocation of Black sisterhood and Black women’s heritage of quilting. William Peden, writing in The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940-1975, called this same collection “a remarkable book.” David Guy’s commentary on The Color Purple in the Washington Post Book World included this evaluation: “the women [in the novel] are able to extricate themselves from oppression; they leave their men, find useful work to support themselves. ... In The Color Purple the role of male domination in the frustration of black women’s struggle for independence is clearly the focus.”

Some reviewers criticize Walker’s fiction for portraying an overly negative view of Black men. Charles Larson, in his Detroit News review of The Color Purple, remarked, “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that all the male characters [in the novel] are villains, but the truth is fairly close to that.” However, Larson did not feel that this is a major fault in the novel, and he noted that by the end of the novel, “several of [Walker’s] masculine characters have reformed.”

This idea of reformation, this sense of hope even in despair, is at the core of Walker’s vision. In spite of the brutal effects of sexism and racism suffered by the characters of her short stories and novels, critics note what Art Seidenbaum of the Los Angeles Times called Walker’s sense of “affirmation … [that] overcomes her anger.” This is particularly evident in The Color Purple, according to several reviewers. Ford, for example, asserted that the author’s “polemics on … political and economic issues finally give way to what can only be described as a joyful celebration of human spirit—exulting, uplifting and eminently universal.” Prescott discovered a similar progression in the novel. He wrote, “[Walker’s] story begins at about the point that most Greek tragedies reserve for the climax, then … by immeasurable small steps … works its way toward acceptance, serenity and joy.”

Davis referred to this idea as Walker’s “vision of survival” and offered a summary of its significance in Walker’s work. “At whatever cost, human beings have the capacity to live in spiritual health and beauty; they may be poor, black, and uneducated, but their inner selves can blossom.” This vision, extended to all humanity, is evident in Walker’s collection Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987. Although “her original interests centered on black women, and especially on the ways they were abused or underrated,” New York Times Book Review contributor Noel Perrin believed that “now those interests encompass all creation.” Judith Paterson similarly observed in Tribune Books that in Living by the Word, “Walker casts her abiding obsession with the oneness of the universe in a question: Do creativity, love and spiritual wholeness still have a chance of winning the human heart amid political forces bent on destroying the universe with poisonous chemicals and nuclear weapons?” Walker explores this question through journal entries and essays that engage with Native Americans, racism in China, a lonely horse, smoking, and response to the criticism leveled against both the novel and the film version of The Color Purple. Derrick Bell noted in his Los Angeles Times Book Review critique that Walker “uses carefully crafted images that provide a universality to unique events.” The critic further asserted that Living by the Word “is not only vintage Alice Walker: passionate, political, personal, and poetic, it also provides a panoramic view of a fine human being saving her soul through good deeds and extraordinary writing.”

Though Walker’s fourth novel, The Temple of My Familiar (1989) received harsh reviews by critics, novelist J. M. Coetzee, writing in the New York Times Book Review, implored the reader to look upon the novel as a “fable of recovered origins, as an exploration of the inner lives of contemporary black Americans as these are penetrated by fabulous stories.” Bernard W. Bell, writing in the Chicago Tribune, felt that the novel is a “colorful quilt of many patches,” and that its “stylized lovers, remembrances of things past, bold flights of fantasy and vision of a brave new world of cultural diversity and cosmic harmony challenge the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief.”

For Walker’s Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete (2003), a Publishers Weekly reviewer offered high praise, characterizing Walker as “composed, wry, unshaken by adversity,” and suggesting that her “strong, beautiful voice” beckons us “to heal ourselves and the planet.”

Critics celebrated Walker’s controversial fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), about the practice of female genital mutilation in certain African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Tina McElroy Ansa said that taking on such a taboo subject showed Walker’s depth and range. The critic also felt that her portrait of the suffering of Tashi—a character from The Color Purple—is “stunning.” And Donna Haisty Winchell wrote in her Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that this novel is “much more concise, more controlled, and more successful as art” than The Temple of My Familiar, and demonstrates an effective blend of “art and activism.”

Walker’s concerns about the international issue of female genital mutilation prompted her to further explore the issue, both on film and in the book Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993), written with documentary film director Pratibha Parmar. According to a Publishers Weekly contributor, Warrior Marks is a “forceful account” of how the two filmed a documentary on the ritual circumcision of African women.

In 1996, Walker published The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult; A Meditation of Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the film “The Color Purple,” Ten Years Later. The book focuses mainly on Walker’s feelings about, and struggles with, the filming of The Color Purple. While having the book transformed into a film by Steven Spielberg was a high point in her life, it was also riddled with difficulties. First, Spielberg rejected Walker’s screenplay of the book and implemented one with which Walker was not happy. In addition, the film itself was met with controversy and attacks on Walker’s ideas—some people thought she had attacked the character of Black people in general and Black men specifically. Also at the time, Walker’s mother was critically ill, while Walker herself was suffering from Lyme disease. Included in the book are fan letters, reviews, and Walker’s original version of the script.

Walker’s sixth novel, By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), focuses on female sexuality. The main characters are the Robinsons, a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists, and the story is told in flashback. Unable to secure funding for research in Mexico in the 1950s, the husband poses as a minister to study the Mundo, a mixed Black and Native American tribe. The couple brings along their young daughter to this new life in the Sierra Madre. Sexuality is at the heart of the story, though the father reacts violently upon discovering that his daughter has become involved with a Mundo boy. This reaction has repercussions throughout the novel. Again, Walker experiments with points of view, even recounting the action through the eyes of the recently deceased patriarch of the Robinson clan. According to Francine Prose, who reviewed the novel in the New York Times Book Review, this novel deals with the “damaging ways in which our puritanical culture suppresses women’s sexuality.”

In her book Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (1997), Walker details her own political and social struggle, while in the critically acclaimed short-story collection The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), she employs fiction in a “quasi-autobiographical reflection” on her own past, including her marriage to a Jewish civil rights lawyer, the birth of her daughter, and the creative life she built after her divorce. For Jeff Guinn, writing for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, the 13 stories plus epilogue of this collection “beautifully leavened the universal regrets of middle age with dollops of uplifting philosophy.” A contributor for Publishers Weekly described the collection as a reflection on the “nature of passion and friendship, pondering the emotional trajectories of lives and loves.” This same reviewer found the collection to be “strong … [and] moving.” Adele S. News-Horst, reviewing the book in World Literature Today, found that it is “peopled by characters who are refugees, refugees from the war over civil rights, from the ‘criminal’ Vietnam-American War, and from sexual oppression.” News-Horst further commented that the “stories are neither forced nor unnatural, and there is a sense of truth in all of them.” And Linda Barrett Osborne, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Way Forward a “touching and provocative collection.”

After publishing The Way Forward, Walker had, she thought, given up writing, taking time off to study Tibetan Buddhism and explore the Amazon. Fueled by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, she began writing poems. In 2003, she published Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, which includes poems that engage with the attacks on New York and Washington, DC. Guinn described the verse in the new collection as “choppy, with sparse clumps of words presented in odd, brisk rhythms.” Such devices resulted, Guinn thought, in occasional “sophisticated thought in simple, accessible form.” Short lines in free verse are the skeletons of most of the poems in the collection, many of them dealing with “social and environmental justice, and America’s blinding ethnocentrism,” as Kelly Norman Ellis remarked in Black Issues Book Review. Ellis further praised the poems in the collection as “psalms about the human capacity for great good and … for unimagined brutality.”

Walker’s seventh novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), is a tale of a successful Black female novelist, Kate, and her search for new meaning as she approaches 60. In a long-time relationship with the artist Yolo, Kate decides to voyage down the Colorado River and then down the Amazon, on trips of self-discovery. Yolo meanwhile goes on his own quest, to Hawaii, and to the woman he once loved. Both Kate and Yolo are changed by their experiences. In Black Issues Book Review, Susan McHenry noted that she “started this novel skeptically, fearing a New Age ramble,” but found “reading this book a richly rewarding journey.” And Booklist’s Vanessa Bush praised this “dreamlike novel [that] incorporates the political and spiritual consciousness and emotional style for which [Walker] is known and appreciated.”

Writing career

Walker wrote the poems that would culminate in her first book of poetry, entitled Once, while she was a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College. Walker would slip her poetry under the office door of her professor and mentor, Muriel Rukeyser, when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence. Rukeyser then showed the poems to her literary agent. Once was published four years later by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Following graduation, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Department of Welfare, before returning to the South. She took a job working for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jackson, Mississippi. Walker also worked as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program. She later returned to writing as writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (1968–69) and Tougaloo College (1970–71). In addition to her work at Tougaloo College, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970. The novel explores the life of Grange Copeland, an abusive, irresponsible sharecropper, husband and father.

In the fall of 1972, Walker taught a course in Black Women's Writers at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

In 1973, before becoming editor of Ms. Magazine, Walker and literary scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered an unmarked grave they believed to be that of Zora Neale Hurston in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960. The line "a genius of the south" is from Jean Toomer's poem Georgia Dusk, which appears in his book Cane. Hurston was actually born in 1891, not 1901.

Walker's 1975 article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston", published in Ms. Magazine and later retitled "Looking for Zora", helped revive interest in the work of this African-American writer and anthropologist.

In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. Meridian is a novel about activist workers in the South, during the civil rights movement, with events that closely parallel some of Walker's own experiences. In 1982, she published what has become her best-known work, The Color Purple. The novel follows a young, troubled black woman who is not just fighting her way through a racist white culture, she is also fighting her way through a patriarchal black culture. The book became a bestseller and it was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie which was directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical totalling 910 performances.

Walker has written several other novels, including The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) (which featured several characters and descendants of characters from The Color Purple). She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other writings. Her work is focused on the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society.

In 2000, Walker released a collection of short fiction, based on her own life, called The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, exploring love and race relations. In this book, Walker details her interracial relationship with Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney who was also working in Mississippi.[23] The couple married on March 17, 1967, in New York City, since interracial marriage was then illegal in the South, and divorced in 1976. They had a daughter, Rebecca, together in 1969. Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's only child, is an American novelist, editor, artist, and activist. The Third Wave Foundation, an activist fund, was co-founded by Rebecca and Shannon Liss-Riordan. Her godmother is Alice Walker's mentor and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem.

In 2007, Walker donated her papers, consisting of 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess".

In 2013, Alice Walker published two new books, one of them entitled The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way. The other was a book of poems entitled The World Will Follow Joy Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems).

Activism

Civil rights

Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington with hundreds of thousands of people. Later, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.

On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. Walker wrote about the experience in her essay "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For".

Womanism

Walker's specific brand of feminism included advocacy on behalf of women of color. In 1983, Walker coined the term womanist in her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, to mean "a black feminist or feminist of color". The term was made to unite women of color and the feminist movement at "the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression". Walker states that "'Womanism' gives us a word of our own". because it is a discourse of Black women and the issues they confront in society. Womanism as a movement came into fruition in 1985 at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to address Black women's concerns from their own intellectual, physical, and spiritual perspectives."

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Walker is a judge member of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and she also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

In January 2009, Walker was one of over fifty signatories of a letter protesting against the Toronto International Film Festival's "City to City" spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, and condemning Israel as an "apartheid regime". Two months later, Walker and sixty other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink traveled to Gaza in response to the Gaza War. Their purpose was to deliver aid, meet with NGOs and residents, and persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders with Gaza. She planned to visit Gaza again in December 2009 to participate in the Gaza Freedom March. On June 23, 2011, she announced plans to participate in an aid flotilla to Gaza that attempted to break Israel's naval blockade.

In May 2013, Walker posted an open letter to singer Alicia Keys, asking her to cancel a planned concert in Tel Aviv. "I believe we are mutually respectful of each other's path and work," Walker wrote. "It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists." Keys rejected the plea. Walker has refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated and published in Hebrew, saying that she finds that "Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories" and noting that she had refused to allow Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel to be shown in South Africa until the system of apartheid was dismantled.

Support for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange

In June 2013, Walker and others appeared in a video expressing their support for Chelsea Manning, an American soldier who was imprisoned for releasing classified information. In recent years she has spoken out repeatedly in support of Julian Assange.

Animal Advocacy

Walker has expressed that animal advocacy is one of her central concerns. Her fiction has increasingly embraced animal ethics over the past four decades, as she works to include animals as both active participants in her novels and as symbols for what she has called "consciousness." Her earliest fiction represents nonhuman animals inasmuch as they are part of human life - namely as farmed animals, food sources, and absent referents for animalized epithets directed at humans, and her fiction increasingly incorporates the animal experience. She has advocated for greater consciousness in human beings and their relationships with animals, stating, "Encouraging others to love nature, to respect other human beings and animals, to adore this earth, is part of my work in this world."

Pacifism

Walker has been a longtime sponsor of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In early 2015, she wrote: "So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one we have dominant today."

Transgender rights

In 2023 Walker publicly defended J.K. Rowling from criticisms of her views regarding trans people and shared that her own views matched Rowling's. Walker was criticized on social media for taking this position with many referring to her as a TERF.

Accusations of antisemitism and praise for David Icke

Since 2012, Walker has expressed appreciation for the works of the British conspiracy theorist David Icke. On BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, she said that Icke's book Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More, which contains anti-semitic conspiracy theories, would be the book she would take to a desert island. The book promotes the theory that the Earth is ruled by shapeshifting reptilian humanoids and "Rothschild Zionists". Jonathan Kay of the National Post described this book (and Icke's other books) as "hateful, hallucinogenic nonsense". Kay wrote that Walker's public praise for Icke's book was "stunningly offensive" and that by taking it seriously, she was disqualifying herself "from the mainstream marketplace of ideas". In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League called anti-Zionist essays in Walker's book The Cushion in the Road "replete with fervently anti-Jewish ideas" and it also stated that Walker was "unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism".

On her blog in 2017, Walker published a poem which she titled "It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study The Talmud", recommending that the reader should start with YouTube to learn about the allegedly shocking aspects of the Talmud, describing it as "poison". The poem contained antisemitic tropes and arguments. In it, she also "describes her reaction when a Jewish friend", later stated to be her ex-husband, accused her "of appearing to be antisemitic".

In 2018, an interviewer from The New York Times Book Review asked Walker "What books are on your nightstand?" She listed Icke's And the Truth Shall Set You Free, a book promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory which draws on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and questions the Holocaust. Walker said: "In Icke's books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person's dream come true." The publication of the interview in the "By the Book" weekly column generated significant criticism of Walker and the New York Times Book Review. The Review was criticized for publishing the interview as well as for failing to contextualize And the Truth Shall Set You Free as an antisemitic work. Walker defended her admiration for Icke and his book, saying: "I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish". Walker argued that any "attempt to smear David Icke, and by association, me, is really an effort to dampen the effect of our speaking out in support of the people of Palestine". Following the controversy Roxane Gay argued that "Alice Walker has been anti-Semitic for years". The NYT released a statement that the contents of the interview "do not imply an endorsement by Times editors".

In 2019, Ayanna Pressley disavowed antisemitism after an uproar ensued following her tweeting of an Alice Walker quote. She tweeted "I fully condemn and denounce anti-Semitism, prejudice and bigotry in all their forms – and the hateful actions they embolden" and said she had been unaware of Walker's statements on the issue.

In 2020, after learning about Walker's support of anti-Semitism, the host of the New York Times podcast Sugar Calling described herself as "mortified" for having hosted Walker on her show and she also said: "If I'd known, I wouldn't have asked Alice Walker to be on the show."

In April 2022, Gayle King of CBS News was criticized for interviewing Walker without challenging her anti-Semitic writings. After the interview, King released a statement, saying: "These are not only legitimate questions, they are mandatory questions. I certainly would have asked her about the criticisms, if I had been aware of them before the interview with Ms. Walker."

In 2022, Walker was disinvited from the Bay Area Book Festival due to what the organizers referred to as her "endorsement of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke". An invitation for Walker to speak at San Diego Community College District was upheld despite opposition from community groups with the organizers citing their belief in free speech. Walker dismissed the criticism as "a ploy to shut down my webpage blog: alicewalkersgarden.com."

Selected works

Novels and short story collections

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) , In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973, includes "Everyday Use") , Meridian (1976) , The Color Purple (1982) , You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982) , To Hell With Dying (1988) , The Temple of My Familiar (1989) , Finding the Green Stone (1991) , Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) , The Complete Stories (1994) , By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998) , The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) , Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004)

Poetry collections

Once (1968) , Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) , Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979) , Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) , Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) , Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003) , A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003) , Collected Poems (2005) , The World Will Follow Joy (2013) , Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems (2010) , Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018)

Non-fiction books

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) , Living by the Word (1988) , Warrior Marks (1993) , The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996) , Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997) , Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001) , We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006) , Pema Chödrön and Alice Walker in Conversation , Overcoming Speechlessness (2010) , Chicken Chronicles, A Memoir (2011) , The cushion in the road – Meditation and wandering as the whole world awakens to be in harm's way (2013)

Essays

"Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" (1983)

42- ] American Literature - Ken Kesey

42- ] American Literature 

Ken Kesey

1935–2001 

Ken Kesey, in full Ken Elton Kesey, (born September 17, 1935, La Junta, Colorado, U.S.—died November 10, 2001, Eugene, Oregon), American writer who was a hero of the countercultural revolution and the hippie movement of the 1960s. His literary reputation rests on two novels, both written before he was thirty. His fame (or notoriety) as a countercultural icon stems from his band of willful misfits, the Merry Pranksters, who openly used and advocated psychedelic drugs.  Kesey’s antics made him an object of admiration and scorn, yet his willingness to push limits and redefine normal boundaries came with a serious sense of purpose.

Kesey’s pugnacious personality was shaped during his years at Springfield High School and the University of Oregon, where he was a champion wrestler and football player. After earning his bachelor’s degree in speech and communications in 1957, he entered Stanford University’s graduate writing program on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. There, while under the guidance of writers Wallace Stegner and Malcolm Cowley, he forged his lifelong friendship with writer Ken Babbs and absorbed the influence of Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac.

In California, Kesey was exposed to the electronic backbeat of a new cultural consciousness as well as to some of its heroes, the most important of them Neal Cassady. Equally important was his job at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where he took LSD and mescaline as a paid volunteer.

Kesey used his experiences at the hospital to launch his writing career with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), which Time described as a protest novel that demonstrated Kesey’s “empathy for the Insider’s view of the Outsider’s world.” Much has been made of Kesey’s introduction to hallucinogenic drugs. Less discussed has been how the writer studied the thought processes of the real-life models for his characters and found his larger theme of how society and technology are used to repress the individual. Charges that the novel is anti-feminist stem from Kesey's depiction of the sadistic Big Nurse, although some critics counter that she is intended to be a distortion of womanhood, not its representative.

Kesey was educated at the University of Oregon and Stanford University. At a Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, he was a paid volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting on their effects. This experience and his work as an aide at the hospital served as background for his best-known novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962; film, 1975), which is set in a mental hospital. He further examined values in conflict in Sometimes a Great Notion (1964).

In the nonfiction Kesey’s Garage Sale (1973), Demon Box (1986), and The Further Inquiry (1990), Kesey wrote of his travels and psychedelic experiences with the Merry Pranksters, a group that traveled together in a bus during the 1960s. Tom Wolfe recounted many of their adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). In 1967 Kesey fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution for possession of marijuana. He returned to California, served a brief sentence, and then moved to a farm near Eugene, Oregon.

In 1988  Kesey published a children’s book, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear. With 13 of his graduate students in creative writing at the University of Oregon, he wrote a mystery novel, Caverns (1990), under the joint pseudonym of O.U. Levon, which read backward is “novel U.O. (University of Oregon).” In Sailor Song (1992), a comedy set in an Alaskan fishing village that becomes the backdrop for a Hollywood film, Kesey examined environmental crises and the end of the world. Subsequently, with the collaboration of Ken Babbs, he wrote a neo-western, Last Go Round (1994).

Works

This is a selected list of Kesey's better-known works.

—— (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-451-16396-7. OCLC 895037361.

—— (1964). Sometimes a Great Notion : a novel. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-004529-1. OCLC 813638027.

—— (1973). Kesey's Garage Sale. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-41268-6. OCLC 899072134. A collection of essays

—— (1986). Demon Box. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-008530-3. OCLC 911911149. A collection of essays and short stories

Levon, O. U. (1990). Caverns : a novel. Introduction by Ken Kesey. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-012208-4. OCLC 20131987. "O.U. Levon" spelled backwards produces "novel U.O" This book was jointly written by a creative writing class taught by Kesey at the University of Oregon (U.O.).

—— (1990). The Further Inquiry. photographs by Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-83174-6. OCLC 20758816. A play / photographic record

—— (1990). Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear. illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-81136-6. OCLC 21339755. A children's book

—— (1992). Sailor Song. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-83521-8. OCLC 25411564. A novel

——; Babbs, Ken (1994). Last Go Round. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-84883-6. OCLC 28548975. A Western genre novel

——; Babbs, Ken (1994). Twister: A Ritual Reality in Three-Quarters Plus Overtime if Necessary. OCLC 74813266, 39040348. A play

—— (2003). Kesey's Jail Journal : Cut the M************ Loose. Introduction by Ed McClanahan. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-87693-8. OCLC 52134654. An expansion of the 1967 journals that Kesey kept while incarcerated