Alice Walker was the youngest of a family of sharecroppers when she was born in rural Georgia in 1944. A copper B.B.
pellet shattered her eye when she was eight years old, while she and her two older brothers were playing. Alice went from being a brash, assured kid who wanted to do big kid stuff after the accident to being a quiet, serious, and introverted young lady.
Author Harper Lee (full name: Nelle Harper Lee; April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016; Monroeville, Alabama, U.S.) is a household name thanks to her best-selling novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
Amasa Coleman Lee Was Harper Lee’s Father,
a lawyer who, by all accounts, embodied the qualities of the novel’s hero, Scout Finch, in terms of good citizenship and a generous heart.
His immature, unsuccessful defense of two African-American men on murder charges is a key story point in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Without finishing her law degree, Lee moved to New York City after attending the University of Alabama (and spending a summer as an exchange student at the University of Oxford).
She started out in New York as an airline reservationist, but because to the generosity of her friends, she was soon able to devote herself entirely to writing.
The novel To Kill a Mockingbird was originally a collection of short pieces that were expanded with the help of an editor.
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King, Stephen
An American Novelist
American novelist and short story writer Stephen King (full name: Stephen Edwin King; born September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, U.S.); his works are credited with revitalizing the horror fiction genre in the late 20th century.
King earned a BA in English from the University of Maine back in 1970. He taught, cleaned, and did odd jobs to make ends meet while composing short stories. Carrie, his debut novel, was released in 1974 (adapted into films in 1976 and 2013), and was an instant hit with readers.
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A Toni Morrison
Writer From The USA
American author Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio; died August 5, 2019 in the Bronx, New York)
was known for her in-depth looks into the Black experience, especially that of African women. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Morrison was raised by parents and grandparents who had a deep affection for and understanding of African-American culture in the American Midwest.
She had a formative early experience with stories, music, and folktales. Her academic background includes time spent at both Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955).
She first taught for two years at Texas Southern University, then for the remaining ten years of her career (1957–1964) at Howard University. Morrison started working as a fiction editor at Random House in 1965 and stayed there for a while.
Maya Angelou is an American actor, poet, and memoirist. The American poet, memoirist, and actress Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St.
Louis, Missouri, U.S. and passing away on May 28, 2014 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina) wrote extensively about her experiences with economic, racial, and sexual oppression in her multiple volumes of autobiography.
Angelou spent the majority of her youth with her paternal grandmother in rural Stamps, Arkansas, despite being born in St. Louis.
She was only eight years old when her mother’s lover raped her and informed her about it; the stress of that experience rendered her nearly speechless for several years after her mother’s boyfriend was dead.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969; TV movie 1979), her first autobiographical book, was well received and was nominated for a National Book Award since it focuses on her childhood.
- A Song Flung Up to Heaven (1986),
- Gather Together in My Name (1974),
- Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976),
- The Heart of a Woman (1981),
- All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986),
- Mom & Me & Mom (2002),
- and Mom & Me & Mom (2003)
- are the subsequent autobiographical volumes (2013).
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston by Carl Van Vecht (1891-1960). April 3, 1938. Black American culture in the rural South was honored by the author, folklorist, and anthropologist.
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If So, Who Said It? Women Authors: A Quiz On Literary Quotes
Angelou and her mother relocated to San Francisco in 1940, when Angelou tried her hand at many jobs, including that of cocktail server, prostitute, madam, cook, and dancer.
Her professional identity was cemented when she began performing as a dancer. Angelou discovered the Harlem Writers’ Guild after relocating to New York City in the late ’50s.
During the same time, Angelou was cast as the lead in a State Department–sponsored production of Porgy and Bess, the folk opera by George Gershwin.
The show toured 22 countries in Europe and Africa. She trained under Martha Graham and Pearl Primus as a dancer. She made her stage debut in The Blacks by Jean Genet in 1961.
That same year, she moved to Cairo at the encouragement of a South African dissident to whom she was temporarily married and who she later worked for at the Arab Observer. Later, she relocated to Ghana, where she contributed to The African Review.
