Alice walker influenced zora neale hurston biography

As at Howard, Hurston was never solely a student at Barnard but also engaged in numerous other activities. By his ideas and his example, he inspired her in the anthropological quests she was to embark on in the years ahead. Life at Barnard had its ups and downs, as Hurston was not permitted to reside in the dormitories and, early on, was laughed at by classmates whenever she recited French.

On February 29,Hurston received her undergraduate degree, becoming the first African American student known to have graduated from Barnard and to become the first trained Black anthropologist. She graduated with a major in English not anthropology, as is often reported and a minor in geology. The same year that she graduated from Barnard, Hurston wrote:.

There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. Having long considered the church "mainly a reactionary power," she finds the black church transformed into a community keeping alive the spirit of martyrs such as Martin Luther King, Jr. It has learned to weave the fight for justice into its songs and sermons. The church has come to mean not a particular denomination, "but rather communal spirit, togetherness, righteous convergence.

Alice walker influenced zora neale hurston biography

Celie sees God as a tall, gray-bearded white man wearing long robes, who acts like all the other men she has known, "trifling, forgitful and lowdown. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. Hindu thought, and of African animism. She realizes that God is inside each person; people come to church to share, not to find, God. Now she comes to realize that loving the world, herself and other people -- admiring the color purple -- is the way to love God.

Walker has called The Color Purple a historical novel dealing not "with the taking of lands or the births, battles, and deaths of Great Men," but with "the historical and psychological threads of the lives my ancestors lived. DecemberP. Yet in part the novel does deal overtly with "the taking of the lands. Written as a series of letters from Celie first to God and then to Nettie, the novel asserts its kinship both with the traditional literary form open to women -- letters and journals -- and with the 18th-century epistolary narratives out of which the English novel arose.

Unlike Hurston, Walker links her novel to the larger literary tradition. As she tells Janie, Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tub find out. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems. Walker later won a Spelman College scholarship for disabled students. Her involvement in various civil rights demonstrations led to her dismissal.

She then won another scholarship at the progressive Sarah Lawrence College. In she traveled to Uganda, Africa where she studied as an exchange student. Upon her return inshe received her B. She was then awarded a writing fellowship and was planning to spend it in Senegal, West Africa. Near Orlando, Eatonville was the first all-black community in America.

From a young age, Hurston grew up seeing strong African American influences, from her father, who wrote out laws for the town, and her mother, who helped write the curriculum for churches. By the time she was 26, Hurston had not finished high school. It struck me that Hurston pretended to be 10 years younger than she was in order to qualify for free schooling.

I admire her fierce ambition, resourcefulness, and commitment to education.