Alice Walker is best known as the author of "The Color Purple," her 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the lives of African-American women in the Deep South early in the 20th century -- which Steven Spielberg made into a film in 1985 starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.
Born in 1944 as the eighth child of Georgia sharecroppers, Walker lost the sight in her right eye at age 8, when one of her brothers accidentally shot her with a BB gun. However, she says that the pain she suffered then, and her disability since, have granted her greater insight into those who are weak or dispossessed.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and now a resident of Berkeley, Calif., Walker, a divorced mother with a grown-up daughter, has written more than 20 books as well as innumerable essays and poems on themes ranging from civil rights, violence, rape and sexism to the environment.