Alice Walker

Walker lost sight in one eye as a child when a brother shot her with a BB gun, an injury that left her withdrawn and turned her toward books; she went on scholarship to Spelman College and then Sarah Lawrence, and worked as a civil rights organizer registering Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s. There she married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, in a union illegal under the state's anti-miscegenation laws at the time.

She coined the term 'womanist' to describe a feminism rooted in Black women's experience, and The Color Purple, written in epistolary form, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Steven Spielberg's 1985 film adaptation was a commercial success but drew criticism, including from some Black critics, for its portrayal of Black men.

In 1973 she tracked down Zora Neale Hurston's unmarked grave in Florida and had it marked, single-handedly reviving Hurston's reputation for a new generation of readers.