Alice Walker saved Zora from obscurity

It is the birthday of novelist Alice Walker (1944), whose book The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her father was a Georgia sharecropper and her mother worked as a maid to put her through school. Walker began writing as a child but had to hide her writing from her family. "I had to keep a lot in my mind," she once told The New York Times. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. Walker's writing deals with the struggles of blacks, especially black women, in today's society. In 1975, she wrote a magazine article that helped spur a renewed interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. She discovered Hurston's unmarked grave in Fort Pierce and paid for a headstone.