Background
Margaret Abigail Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, United States to Sigismund and Marion (Dozier) Walker.
( Margaret Walker became the first African American to wi...)
Margaret Walker became the first African American to win a national literary award when her collection For My People was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942. Over the next fifty years she enriched American literature in endless ways through her writings and, in 1993, she received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. This Is My Century is Walker's own defining summation of her career. Selected by the author herself, the one hundred poems include thirty-seven previously uncollected pieces and the entire contents of three hard-to-find volumes: the award-winning For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day (1970), and October Journey (1975).
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( Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child...)
Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success.
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novelist teacher scholars poet
Margaret Abigail Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, United States to Sigismund and Marion (Dozier) Walker.
Walker received her A. B. from Northwestern University in 1935 and an M. A. in 1940 and Ph. D. in 1965 from the University of Iowa. Walker also held honorary degrees from Northwestern University, Rust College, Dennison University, and Morgan State University.
For more than 30 years Walker taught literature at Livingstone College, Salisbury, North Carolina (1941 - 1942); West Virginia State College (1944 - 1945); and Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi (1949 - 1979).
In addition to teaching, Walker was a prolific writer. She wrote six books between 1942 and 1974. For My People (1942), a collection of poetry about African American racial pride and heritage, brought her instant recognition. Her Civil War novel Jubilee (1966), begun when she was 19, dramatizes actual historical events from American slavery to Reconstruction as the setting for the fictionalized life of her maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans. This novel was translated into five languages and went through 43 printings. Her other book-length works include Prophets for a New Day (1970), How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), October Journey (1973), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Margaret Walker and Nikki Giovanni (1974).
Walker also wrote numerous articles on African American literature and culture. Moreover, she recorded her own poetry, as well as selections from the work of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes, on Folkways Records.
After retiring from teaching at Jackson State University, Walker devoted full-time effort to her writing. She prepared two books for publication in the 1980s - The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright, a definitive, critical biography of Wright; and This is My Century, a collection of poetry possessing the power of For My People.
Walker also worked on five other book-length manuscripts: Mother Broyer, a novel about a faith healer and cult leader; Goose Island, a collection of short stories; A New Introduction to the Humanities, a textbook; Twentieth Century Afro-American Literature, an anthology; and Minna and Jim, a sequel to Jubilee.
Walker continued to reside in Jackson, Mississippi, where she said she must stay and "write for the rest of [her] life, no matter how short or long it is. " In addition to working on the Jubilee she also wrote an autobiography and lectured on African American literature.
Walker died of breast cancer in Chicago, Illinois, in 1998, aged 83.
( Margaret Walker became the first African American to wi...)
( Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child...)
In 1943 she married Firnist James Alexander (deceased 1983), and they parented four children: Marion Elizabeth, Firnist James, Sigismund Walker, and Margaret Elvira.