Walker was the eighth child of African American sharecroppers. While growing up she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores. In an interview with The New York Times in 1983, Walker described her parents as “both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.” When she was eight years old, Walker was sent to live with her grandparents for a year in rural Georgia. In a TimesTalk interview in 2015, she remembered them both as “so kind, so giving,” but they had had a turbulent past caused by her grandfather’s alcohol use. Her grandfather eventually recovered from alcoholism and changed his life for the better. (During her TimesTalk interview, Walker said that this experience led her to wonder “how could people who were so wonderful, when I knew them, be terrible when I didn’t know them?” Her wondering led her to write The Color Purple, because she “had to show what happened to them and why they were like that,” describing the experience of writing the novel as a form of “reclamation.”)

Walker’s first book of poetry, Once, appeared in 1968, and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a narrative that spans 60 years and three generations, followed two years later. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, both appeared in 1973. The latter bears witness to sexist violence and abuse in the African American community. After moving to New York City, where she worked as an editor for Ms. magazine, Walker completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s. In 1981 she published the short-story collection You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. It includes “Nineteen Fifty-five,” which addresses the exploitation of Black music by white musicians in the story of an older, female blues singer (modeled after Big Mama Thornton) whose forgotten song from days gone by becomes the launching point to tremendous fame of a young, Elvis-like rock and roll singer. “The Abortion,” which was inspired by Walker’s own experience when she was in college and while she was living in Mississippi with Leventhal, tells the story of a young Black woman who has two abortions in the era before Roe v. Wade —the first a clandestine and traumatic procedure, the second quick and painless.