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Alice Walker has been honored with most of the major literary awards—including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple—clearly establishing her among the giants of American literature. She has achieved critical and commercial success not only through her five published novels, but for her short stories, poetry, essays, and other writings, and for a top-grossing feature film based on her first best-selling novel. She is among the few contemporary American literary figures who are studied in colleges and universities, and she has become a household name. Renowned scholars of African-American literature Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah have brought together reviews “drawn from newspapers and popular magazines to show Walker's accomplishments in the eyes of her literary contemporaries,” writes Gates, along with a “range of scholarly response.” A self-described womanist, Alice Walker has a following not only among women of color, to whom much of her work is addressed, but among women and men of all ethnicities in the academic and lay communities as well. This unique and revealing collection includes the points of view of writers such as Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces; New York Times book critic Mel Watkins; Barbara Christian, author of Black Feminist Criticism; bell hooks, author of Black Looks; and others who represent the many and varied people who are influenced and affected by her work. In "To Try Men's Souls" Robert Coles writes, “Alice Walker is a fighter as well as a meditative poet and lyrical novelist. She has taken part in the struggles her people have waged, and also knows the struggles they must yet face in this greatest of the world's democracies. Mary Helen Washington, editor of Black-eyed Susans and Memory of Kin, expresses her belief that “the true empathy Alice Walker has for the oppressed woman comes through in all her writings—stories, essays, poems, novels.” Though Walker is described as a “lavishly gifted writer,” she is also subjected to respectful criticism. Alice Hall Petry, author of Understanding Anne Tyler, says, “As a short story writer, Alice Walker seems to alternate between presenting editorials as fiction, experimenting with the short story as a recognized literary form, and rather self-consciously writing ‘conventional’ short stories. At best the results are mixed.” The essays, reviews, a chronology, and two interviews with Alice Walker (in which she discusses her “craft”) help Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present reveal the many dimensions of this fascinating writer and offer a unique way of appreciating and celebrating her work and the profound impact it has on her and on her students, peers, and readers around the world.
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