A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

Cooper. Together they helped to stimulate her interest and talent in writing, and inspired her to
write poems that eventually appeared in Once (1968). At the end of her freshman year in 1962
Walker was invited to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home in recognition of her being invited to
attend the youth world peace festival in Helsinki, Finland. In August 1963, she travelled to
Washington, D.C., for the ‘March on Washington for jobs and Freedom’. As Sarah Lawrence,
she graduated in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. During her junior year, she travelled to
Africa and Europe; which sparked her interest in travelling abroad. However, in the senior year
of college, Walker discovered that she was pregnant. During this time, she considered
committing suicide and wrote volumes of poetry to help herself deal with her feelings and worst
fears. With the help of a friend, she had a safe abortion. Walker’s mentor, Muriel Ruykeyser,
sent a short story of Alice’s titled, To Hell with Dying to a publisher, where it was published
shortly thereafter and Walker received a hand written note of encouragement from Hughes.
Alice Walker has been a strong and outspoken activist on a variety of issues. In the Fall
of 1965, she moved to New York City where she worked in the city’s Welfare Department. The
next year she moved to Jackson, Mississippi when she volunteered for voter registration drives
and Head start programmers. While there she crept and instantly fell in love with a young Jewish
law student name Mei Eventual who was working for the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
She then returned to New York and the affair ended in getting married in March of 1967. Soon
after marriage, they received many threats of physical violence because of their inter-racial
marriage. Alice began working as a black history teacher and soon became pregnant. In 1968,
she accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. In the same
year her first volume of poetry, titled Once, was published. Christian remarked that in once
walker displayed what would become a feature of her future poetry and fiction, “Unwavering
honesty in evoking the forbidden, either in political stances or in love”. Next year she finally
published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which was published in 1970.
That same year, Walker was appointed writer-in-residence at Tougaloo, Mississippi. Walker’s
career took off as she quickly moved from the Radcliff Institute. In 1972, she accepted a teaching
position at Wellesley College where she created one of the first women’s studies courses in the
nation, a Women Literature Course. In 1976, she published her second novel, Meridian, a story
that chronicled a young woman’s struggle during the Civil Rights Movement. Then after having
divorced Eventual she married Robert Allen, the editor of Black Schuler: she published her