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Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. The youngest daughter of sharecroppers, she grew up poor, with her mother working as a maid to help support the family's eight children.At 8 years old, Walker was shot in the right eye with a BB pellet while playing with two of her brothers. Whitish scar tissue formed in her damaged eye, and she became self-conscious of this visible mark.After the incident, Walker largely withdrew from the world around her. "For a long time, I thought I was very ugly and disfigured," she told John O'Brien in an interview that was published in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present (1993). "This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults and slights that were not intended." She found solace in reading and writing poetry.

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Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. The youngest daughter of sharecroppers, she grew up poor, with her mother working as a maid to help support the family's eight children.At 8 years old, Walker was shot in the right eye with a BB pellet while playing with two of her brothers. Whitish scar tissue formed in her damaged eye, and she became self-conscious of this visible mark.After the incident, Walker largely withdrew from the world around her. "For a long time, I thought I was very ugly and disfigured," she told John O'Brien in an interview that was published in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present (1993). "This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults and slights that were not intended." She found solace in reading and writing poetry.

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With the help of a scholarship, Walker was able to attend Spelman College in Atlanta. She later switched to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. While at Sarah Lawrence, Walker visited Africa as part of a study-abroad program. She graduated in 1965—the same year that she published her first short story.

After college, Walker worked as a social worker, teacher and lecturer. She became active in the Civil Rights Movements, fighting for equality for all African Americans.

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Walker's career as a writer took flight with the publication of her third novel, The Color Purple, in 1982. Set in the early 1900s, the novel explores the female African American experience through the life and struggles of its narrator, Celie. Celie suffers terrible abuse at the hands of her father, and later, from her husband. The compelling work won Walker both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983.

In 1985, Walker's story made it to the big screen: Steven Spielberg directed The Color Purple, which starred Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, as well as Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Like the novel, the movie was a critical success, receiving 11 Academy Award nominations. Walker explored her own feelings about the film in her 1996 work, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. In 2005, The Color Purple became a Broadway musical.

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Through her involvement in civil rights activism, Walker met the New York City-born Jewish lawyer Melvyn Leventhal. Following their marriage in 1967, they became the first legally married interracial couple to live in Mississippi. The two had one daughter, Rebecca, before divorcing in 1976.

Walker later dated both men and women, including singer Tracy Chapman. She was also known for publicly feuding with her daughter, who described how she was neglected by her writer mom in her memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2000)

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Along with her Pulitzer and National Book Award, Walker has been honored with the O. Henry Award and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. Additionally, she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2006 and received the LennonOno Peace Award in 2010.

In 2007, Walker's personal papers were made available to the public at Emory University in Georgia. In 2013, she was the subject of the acclaimed documentary Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth.