Alice Walker
Alice Walker, one of the best-known and most highly respected writers in the US, was born in Eatonton , Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. Her parents were sharecroppers, and money was not always available as needed. At the tender age of eight, Walker lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. This left her in somewhat a depression, and she secluded herself from the other children. Walker felt like she was no longer a little girl because of the traumatic experience she had undergone, and she was filled with shame because she thought she was unpleasant to look at. During this seclusion from other kids her age, Walker began to write poems. Hence, her career as a writer began.
Despite this tragedy in her life and the feelings of inferiority, Walker became valedictorian of her class in high school and received a “rehabilitation scholarship” to attend Spelman. Spelman College was a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia, not far from Walker’s home. While at Spelman, Walker became involved in civil rights demonstrations where she spoke out against the silence of the institution’s curriculum when it came to African-American culture and history. Her involvement in such activities led to her dismissal from the college. So she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and had the opportunity to travel to Africa as an exchange student. Upon her return, she received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. She received a writing fellowship and was planning to spend it in Senegal, West Africa, but her plans changed when she decided to take ajob as a case worker in the New York City welfare department. Walker later moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi, during which time she became more involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She used her own and others’ experiences as material for her searing examinations of politics. She also volunteered her time working at the voter registration drive in Mississippi. Walker often admits that her decision not to take the writing fellowship was based on the realization that she could never live happily in Africa or anywhere else until she could live freely in Mississippi.
Walker found the love of her life in 1967, a white activist civil rights lawyer name Mel Leventhal, and they were married in 1967.
The College had a dining hall that all the students gathered in. One morning there was a maggot found in the grits.(253 Moody) Anne Moody led a boycott against the food that was being served and figured out a way to feed the students at least for a little bit of time.(255 Moody) Starting the boycott showed Anne that she could make something of a difference. Anne transferred to Tougaloo College where a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was. (269 Moody) Tougaloo College is where Anne Moody first became truly involved in the Movement. She states that even though she feared that she might be beaten or killed for joining the NAACP she knew that she was still going to join because she had wanted to for a long time. (269 Moody) Moody helped promote voter registration among blacks in various communities. Through the canvasing Anne says, “For the first time I began to think something would be done about whites killing, beating and misusing Negroes.” (276 Moody) Anne Moody was finally feeling as though she was able to make a difference for the black
Anne Moody’s memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, is an influential insight into the existence of a young girl growing up in the South during the Civil-Rights Movement. Moody’s book records her coming of age as a woman, and possibly more significantly, it chronicles her coming of age as a politically active Negro woman. She is faced with countless problems dealing with the racism and threat of the South as a poor African American female. Her childhood and early years in school set up groundwork for her racial consciousness. Moody assembled that foundation as she went to college and scatter the seeds of political activism. During her later years in college, Moody became active in numerous organizations devoted to creating changes to the civil rights of her people. These actions ultimately led to her disillusionment with the success of the movement, despite her constant action. These factors have contributed in shaping her attitude towards race and her skepticism about fundamental change in society.
Walker delves into the subconscious and ever-present spirituality that is found in African-American women and she believes that it is important to identify with this.
Anne Moody had thought about joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but she never did until she found out one of her roommates at Tougaloo college was the secretary. Her roommate asked, “why don’t you become a member” (248), so Anne did. Once she went to a meeting, she became actively involved. She was always participating in various freedom marches, would go out into the community to get black people to register to vote. She always seemed to be working on getting support from the black community, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Son after she joined the NAACP, she met a girl that was the secretary to the ...
In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer fully explicates the cultural standard known as curteisye through satire. In the fourteenth century curteisye embodied sophistication and an education in French international culture. The legends of chilvalric knights, conversing in the language of courtly love, matured during this later medieval period. Chaucer himself matured in the King's Court, and he reveled in his cultural status, but he also retained an anecdotal humor about curteisye. One must only peruse his Tales to discern these sentiments. In the General Prologue, he meticulously describes the Prioress, satirically examining her impeccable table manners. In the Miller's Tale Chaucer juxtaposes courtly love with animalistic lust, and in various other instances he mentions curteisye, or at least alludes to it, with characteristic Chaucerian irony. These numerous references provide the reader with a remarkably rich image of the culture and class structure of late fourteenth century England.
Boardman, Phillip C. "Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)." Enduring Legacies: Ancient and Medieval Cultures. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson Custom Pub., 2000. 430-54. Print.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804 (net). He attended Bowdoin College with famous writers such as Horatio Bridge and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (net). In 1850, Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter (1222). It is considered by many that The Scarlet Letter, “represents the height of Hawthorne’s literary genius. At this time, Boston was the center of a very Puritan society. Throughout the novel Hawthorne uses many symbols. For example, one prominent symbol is the scaffold. During this period in time, the scaffold was used for public humiliation. Those who had committed either a crime or a sin were forced to stand upon it in front of everybody in the town, as a form of confession or public recognition of one’s sin. In The Scarlet Letter, the scaffold not only represents the act of confessing but it also can be seen as a symbol of the stern, inflexible doctrine of the Puritan faith. The Scarlet Letter is centered on the three scaffold scenes, which unite the work, beginning, middle, and end. Hawthorne uses these scenes to aid in his development of the main characters, Hester Pryne, the Reverend Mr. Dimmsdale, and to a lesser degree, Roger Chillingsworth.
Schoeck, Richard J. and Jerome Taylor, Ed. Chaucer Criticism Volume II: Troilus and Criseyde & The Minor Poems. University of Notre Dame Press, 1961. Print.
• AW and her ex-husband Melvyn Leventhal were the first legally married interracial couple to live in the state of Missisippi (married in 1967, divorced in 1976). They had a daughter, Rebecca. She later remarried fellow editor Robert Allen.
Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999
Mandell, Jerome. Geoffrey Chaucer : building the fragments of the Canterbury tales. N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
Howard, Donald R. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987.
peak of its activity, for walker, she has more important things do than learn to behave like a lady. Walker influenced by her history professor, Howard Zinn, leftist intellectual “the first white man with whom she’d ever had a real conversation” (Donnelly17), who shares her as one of the blacks discontent of injustices of segregation “Both on the Spelman campus and in the often surreal, segregated world of Atlanta. Professor Zinn, attentive and always bearing a warm and welcoming smile, stood in unshakable solidarity with black people” (17). His encouragement of student resistance and his being in favor of their rebellions against the restrictions imposed by their college leads in the summer of 1963 to his dismiss, when Walker was staying far
Through remarkably realistic characters like Elinor, Marianne, Fanny, Lucy, and Col. Brandon, Austen brings our attention to the way we should and should not act. She highlights sense’s importance, but insists that sensibility must temper it. These lessons, as much as the compelling stories, explain why Austen’s work is still relevant today. Read her works; learn what she teaches; strive to live your life in a way that unites sense and
Throughout Jane Austen’s lifetime her most treasured relationship was with her older sister, Cassandra. Neither sister was married, though both were engaged, and their correspondences provide Austenian scholars with many insights. Austen began working on her manuscript for Sense and Sensibility the same year that Cassandra’s fiancé, Tom Fowle, passed away. Although there is no evidence to prove that Jane wrote Sense and Sensibility with her sister in mind, it is evident that she writes of a familial bond that she certainly felt with Cassandra. Many readers think of Jane Austen as a writer with a penchant for constructing sparkling, but Sense and Sensibility goes against that framework, providing us with underwhelming romances, overshadowed by the sisters’ relationship. Claudia Johnson argues that the reason Sense and Sensibility was not a huge critical success was because, “Pride and Prejudice was the model for what a novel by Jane Austen ought to be, and, set against that model, Sense and Sensibility came short,’ (Johnson, Sense and Sensibility, ix). As its title suggests, Sense and Sensibility is a novel about the intertwining of sense and sensibility in life, love and family. According to Cassandra, the roots of Sense and Sensibility can be found in an epistolary novel called Elinor and Marianne, which, most likely written in 1795, documented the correspondences between two sisters separated by marriage (Pride and Prejudice 407). In the late 1790s Austen rewrote this novel into the third person. Sense and Sensibility was met with positive criticism, specifically in the “British Critic” and the “Critical Review,” and was praised primarily for the characters and the morality which governed the story. Widely regarded as the most d...