Alice Walker Research Paper

In the late 19th century and 20th centuries America gained multiple cultures through the mass immigration to America. The melting pot of America consisted of many different ethnicities. Through this change many travelers needed to voice their feelings about their experience entering America. Native American writers shared their experiences with the confrontation of the white man. Slaves and African Americans wrote about their experiences and what they endured during this time as well. American ethnic literature is the voices of America. Voices that struggled to be heard during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The authors shared a great deal of their experiences, their thoughts and feelings through literature and gave the nation

Her family was sharecroppers and Walker’s mother was a maid. The family was very poor. She went to segregated schools and then graduated at the top of her class. With the help of a scholarship she attended Spelman College in Atlanta Georgia. Her early childhood experiences led her to poetry and writing novels. She took comfort in relying on literature to help her get through her life and pursued lecturing and being present in the Civil Rights movement. Walker was also a voice in the feminist movement. Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet. Some of her famous literary works are Third Life of Grange (1970), a poetry collection In Love and Trouble (1973) and the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple (1982), among many other great literary works in her lifetime. Alice Walker did a fantastic job at luring the reader into the life of “Celie” in The Color Purple. This novel and movie led the reader/viewer into the life of the African American culture and struggles during the early 1900’s (Alice Walker,

She grew up in the later half of the 19th century as the granddaughter of the Chief of the Paiute tribes. Hopkins helped “for centuries to preserve and enrich their tribes’ splendid traditions of oral literature” (McQuade, et. al., 1999). During this era it wasn’t often you read about the Native Americans. If so, the authors took a romantic, nostalgic and fictional writing style to tell their story. Hopkins wrote Life Among the Piutes (1883). In this great literary work Hopkins shares her personal story of the encounter of the white man and what her ancestors had to endure during this time period. The audience of her work were primarily white people who were intrigued by their culture and “savage ways” (McQuade, et.al.,1999). She acted as a liaison between her tribe and the white settlers. She wrote about the excitement the tribe had to see the white man and why. She also touched on the disappointment her tribe had when they learned the truth about the white settlers and how they wanted to unite as brothers and sisters. Hopkins writes about the preservation of the tribe and their cultural values during this terrifying time (McQuade, et. al.,