Picking Flowers Under Fire: The Diaries of Alice Walker

Beyond her work, Alice Walker has always been at the center of debates and events in modern society. In this new book, discover the author of The Color Purple through her personal writings .

Alice Walker is one of the most important figures of our time. A Black woman born into a large, low-income family in the Southern United States, she managed—through effort, talent, and the support of those who believed in the power of her voice—to achieve worldwide recognition.

The need to write is like thirst, says Walker, who began recording ideas, perceptions, and feelings in diaries at age 18 and has never stopped. Since then, her diary confessions have totaled more than 65 volumes and trace what makes a woman who she is—as noted by Valerie Boyd, a professor, writer, and literary critic who spent nearly a decade organizing the entries from her various notebooks. The result is a passionate, intimate, and poetic record of the development of a unique and irreproachable artist.

Besides being a celebrated author, Walker was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr.; she married a Jewish lawyer, defying laws against interracial marriage; she chose to have an early abortion; years later, she gave birth to her daughter while writing her first novel; she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; she defied conventions by coming out as bisexual; and she denounced female genital mutilation practices. Amidst a vibrant and well-known public life, it is now possible to glimpse her innermost being: her family, her loves, her friendships, her financial problems, and her spiritual anguish, which form the layers of the individual and give her a sense of humanity and identification.

“Alice Walker has faced some of the most thorny events of the 20th century in the United States. […] Now she shares her diaries with us, offering readers a window into her life.” — The New York Times

“Decades of journal writing by the author of The Color Purple , organized for the first time, explores the development of her thoughts and feelings as a writer, a woman, an African-American, and a citizen of the world.” — The Guardian

Alice Walker knew that her words, even the most diaristic, might well be intended for the public, and she knew this even before any text was published. […] The pages of these diaries record everything from epiphanies to the irritations of everyday life, and map, for an intimate reader already dimly aware, the progress of a literary pilgrim. Pain, joy, waves of depression, restlessness, commitment, even disaffection—all are material. And this is what fuels the writing and sustains the reading. —The New Yorker