When Alice Walker was eight, growing up in Georgia, her brother shot her in the eye while playing with a pellet gun. A passing white motorist in the Jim Crow South refused to stop, and by the time she reached a doctor, her right eye was blind. Yet she came to see the wound as a gift. "On a spiritual level it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden," she says. "It's illuminated life more than darkened it."
Now 60, Walker has created an oeuvre of more than 27 books, of poetry, novels, short stories, essays, memoirs and children's writing. For her admirers she is a seer who shatters taboos, from violence within black families and love across the US "colour line" or between women, to female genital mutilation. With The Color Purple (1982), her most famous novel, which has sold more than five million copies in the US and been translated into 26 languages, Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Set in Georgia between the wars, the tale of Celie, sexually abused as a child by a father figure, then by her husband, before she finds a healing lover in his blues-singer mistress Shug, also provoked controversy. Fury at its portrayal of black men was amplified by Steven Spielberg's 1985 Hollywood adaptation, with Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. But Walker came to suspect that she was being judged for her "lifestyle" as much as for her books, both for her marriage to a white lawyer - and collaboration with white feminists - in an era of black nationalist separatism, and for her later avowed bisexuality. A Broadway musical of the book, which premiered in Atlanta last autumn, opens in New York later this year. It follows publication in the US last October of the first full-length biography, Alice Walker: A Life (WW Norton), by Evelyn C White. In Britain, after Walker broke with her publisher, The Women's Press, Weidenfeld & Nicolson is reissuing 17 titles. Yet critics, meanwhile, claim her later work evinces a Californian new-age vacuity. Reviewing The Temple of My Familiar (1989) in the New York Times, novelist JM Coetzee admonished that invented worlds "must be possible worlds... not untethered fantasies; and they must be born of creative energy, not of dreamy fads".
Walker lives in the Berkeley hills, across the bay from San Francisco, in a house with a meditation room containing a candle-lit Buddhist shrine. She lives alone but for her labrador Marley, named after the reggae legend who inspired the dreadlocks she adopted 20 years ago, and cultivates tomatoes and collard greens - the "basis of southern cooking". She also has a 40-acre retreat upstate, amid the vineyards of Mendocino county, designed like a Japanese farmhouse-cum Shinto shrine. During its construction by "hippy" friends ("wonderful but very slow"), she acquired a winter home on the Mexican coast.
Her latest novel, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart, is set in Colorado, Hawaii and the Amazon jungle, where the 50-something Kate Nelson Talkingtree has a Shamanic initiation into indigenous healing. A "remarkably awful compendium of inanities", Michiko Kakutani sniffed in the New York Times, while Diana Evans in the Independent, though admiring of its "languid and effortlessly graceful" prose, found the novel "preoccupied with an ethereal inner world". Although stung by such criticisms, Walker says, "I deeply don't care. My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it." She too journeyed the length of the Colorado river, and travelled in Africa and the Amazon. In her 50s, she says, "I fell in love with three women, and had a wonderful time experimenting with ways of being and loving." As an "apprentice elder", she studied medicinal plants and revelled in anonymity ("It was like sinking back into the vegetation"). A student of Buddhism for years, she says, "I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that's my religion." Brought up a Methodist, she feels herself "born a pagan; my family were country dwellers. I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved", where succour was found in spirituality and nature. She sees her pagan roots as a link between her African, Cherokee and Scots-Irish lineages.
Yet Walker's eclectic beliefs are twinned with political activism. She was arrested at an international women's day peace protest at the White House before the Iraq war. She voted Green in the 2000 election, but backed John Kerry in November, though it was a "painful vote because I'd vowed never to back the lesser of two evils". "People who think my last book is new age have so little understanding of the poverty of the indigenous world and their collision with pharmaceuticals," she says in exasperation. "That's where I stand: with poor people and their right to their medicine."
Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eat-onton, a small town in Georgia, in 1944, the youngest of eight children. Her father, Willie Lee, was a sharecropper who organised the first black voters in the county (he voted for Roosevelt), and built a one-room school for their children. Her mother, Minnie Tallulah, was an "artist whose palette was a flower garden". She picked cotton and worked as a maid, sewing quilts (also a passion of her daughter's) and canning fruit. They were "hardworking people, very moral", and "great storytellers; so full of richness and dignity that poverty, till I looked back, didn't seem restrictive". Defying the landowner, four-year-old Alice escaped the cotton fields by going to school. The scar tissue on her eye, not rectified by an operation until she was 14, left her feeling "disfigured and ugly". Yet she believes her bookish solitude, and sense of being an outcast, honed her powers of sympathy and observation.
She was fascinated by the violence around her, the shootings and beatings of wives and children, though not in her own house. "My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap." Yet Walker, who adored her grandfathers, was aware of their past. "My mother's mother was beaten by her husband; my father's father was a batterer; an admirer of my grandmother Kate shot her down in a churchyard and she died in my [11-year-old] father's arms. I wanted to understand why there was violence in the community - in all communities - and in my family." Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), traced three generations of a sharecropping family in Georgia, from the 1900s to the 1960s, with the murder of a woman by her husband based on a real case in Walker's home town.
In 1961 Walker took up a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, an institution for black women founded by white philanthropists. It was satirised in Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), as "Saxon College", where women must aspire to "Ladyhood" and "processed lavender hair". The Russian historian Howard Zinn, emeritus professor of Boston University, recalls Walker as quiet but "astoundingly eloquent and elegant on paper", and says Spelman was "stifling - a seminary to pull young women out of peasant backgrounds to function in the segregated black community. They had to be 'civilised'; how they poured tea was more important than the books they read." Yet Walker broke the convent-like rules, dating white students and joining the growing sit-ins and pickets on and off campus. When her mentor Zinn was fired for "insubordination" for backing student demands, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence, a women's liberal arts college in Bronxville, New York, where she graduated in 1965.
During voluntary work in Kenya she had an affair with a fellow student, returning home pregnant and in despair. Her first book of poems, Once (1968), was written after an abortion, then still illegal. Writing poetry, she has said, is "my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before". The poet Muriel Rukeyser, Walker's teacher, passed the poems to her agent ("I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing"). Her first short story, "To Hell With Dying" (1967), was picked for an anthology by the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
Walker witnessed Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington in 1963, and later wrote after meeting his widow, Coretta King, that "my life, like that of millions of black young southerners, seemed to find its beginning and purpose at the precise moment I first heard him speak". Turning down a writer's fellowship to Senegal, she worked for voter registration in Mississippi, the most repressive southern state. "It offended me that there should be a place in this country where I had to be afraid to walk, to speak, to laugh," she says. There she fell in love with Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil-rights lawyer, a "handsome, brilliant, brave, sexy man who loved poetry". After living together in New York, where Walker worked for the welfare office, they married in 1967 and spent seven years in Jackson, Mississippi, working to desegregate schools. They were the only openly interracial couple in the state ("We married because it was illegal"). In 1968, on news of King's assassination, Walker miscarried. But the next year, three days after finishing her first novel, she gave birth to Rebecca, a "movement child". In a later afterword to The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker recalled the struggle to "speak up about violence among black people... at the same time that all black people (and some whites) - including me and my family - were enduring massive psychological and physical violence from white supremacists."
According to her biographer, when Walker began to write, "there was so much shame in black culture about our experiences in the South. People said, forget slavery and Jim Crow; let's leap to African royalty. But Alice focused on the southern agrarian experience with tenderness and tenacity." For the critic Henry Louis Gates Jr, she was, with the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, one of "two central figures in the renaissance of black women's writing" of the 70s. Her influences ranged from Russian novels and Japanese haiku to the Brontës, Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing. But in a 1976 essay, "Saving the Life That is Your Own", she wrote that she was bereft of kindred models until she chanced on a footnote about the Harlem renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Walker's discovery and marking of Hurston's grave in Florida in 1973 sparked a revival. She taught the first US course in black women's literature, at Wellesley College, in 1972, and the essays of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) unearth a buried tradition, from the 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley to Gwendolyn Brooks and Nella Larsen. As she said, "I write all the things I should have been able to read." Yet she never wrote for a particular group, she says. "It was about expressing my views and trusting there were people who would understand. I used to read Somerset Maugham all the time, even though he was white and English. Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real."
Her marriage came under pressure, not only from the Ku Klux Klan but from black nationalists, who saw her husband as an interloper. In Zinn's view, Walker was "never part of the overt anti-white feeling during black power. Partly because of her travels, in Africa and the Soviet Union, she was aware of politics beyond Atlanta - of the cold war and Cuba." Darryl Pinckney, author of a forthcoming book on 20th-century African-American literature, Sold and Gone, commends Walker's insights into the "psychology of the civil-rights movement". Meridian skewered the sexual double standards she found rife in the movement. "Most of the nationalists had white wives or girlfriends, and bi-racial children," she says. "It was our openness they despised. We were delighted with each other, while people around us were acting in a very backward manner." Her defiance found voice in such poems as "Be Nobody's Darling" and "While Love is Unfashionable". But, she says, "it wore us out. Love needs support, and we didn't have it - from his family or mine." A fictional memoir of her marriage in The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart (2000) traced the end of an idealism that "our love made us bulletproof".
Moving back to New York in 1974, the couple divorced two years later, their daughter spending alternate years with them. With the late poet June Jordan, Walker founded The Sisterhood, a group of women writers, including Morrison, Ntozake Shange and Audrey Edwards. When a New York Times reviewer urged Morrison to reach beyond black "provincial" life, so as to transcend the classification "black woman writer", Walker wrote a riposte: "Is Ms Morrison to transcend herself? The time has gone forever when black people felt limited by themselves."
The writer Jackie Kay was among British readers avid for the "exciting generation of black American women. It was a way of exploring yourself and things you'd felt alone with; being a black woman here, especially in Scotland, was isolating." According to Kay, much feminist talk in the 1970s "seemed luxurious; black women felt excluded". Walker coined the term "womanist" for black feminists, "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female... Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." Yet she agreed to act as a contributing editor of Ms magazine, run by Gloria Steinem (who is godmother to Walker's daughter) - a "betrayal" for which she was attacked. "I could see their feminism wasn't mine," she says. "My life experience isn't the same as Gloria's, but we're good friends. I was just amazed people had time to be concerned about what I did. I had a child, who I brought to work with me. I was cooking, cleaning, trying to renovate a wreck in Brooklyn; writing novels, stories, poems. I had a full life and assumed others did too."
She moved to California in 1978 for the "freedom - that's all that keeps me anywhere - and to be close to the countryside, and the Pacific. I love clean air and water, and big trees." She began a 13-year relationship with Robert Allen, an editor of the Black Scholar journal, with whom she started the Wild Trees Press. The first few years with Allen were difficult, she says. But later "we were enchanted, and most of the time was truly wonderful".
The Color Purple (1982), an epistolary novel in folk language, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 25 weeks. "People forget how radical the subject-matter was," says Evelyn White. "It was about sexual abuse of children. There's since been an opening of black American culture to look at the complexity and dysfunction - with OJ, Mike Tyson, Clarence Thomas, even the Oprah Show. But then it was as if the veil had been ripped off black America. People called Alice a traitor." As Walker wrote in her record of the controversy, The Same River Twice (1996), "I was called 'liar' and 'whore' and 'traitor' for no other reason than that people who have been made to depend on the approval of the powerful grow afraid of criticising themselves, because the powerful may hear."
Pinckney in the New York Review of Books thought Walker had "turned Hurston's folk wisdom... into feminist cliches". But the writer Tina McElroy Ansa, founder of the Sea Island artists' retreat in Georgia, praises her pioneering use of "southern language, country people's way of speaking, to express feminist ideas". While the critic bell hooks found "fantasy triumphs over imagination" in a fairytale ending, Steinem believes Walker's "greatest gift is that she allows us to believe in redemption, in how people change. Her optimism annoys people."
Walker, criticised for allowing a white director to adapt her novel, initially deemed Spielberg's film of The Color Purple "slick, sanitised and apolitical". She felt the male characters lacked growth, and the lesbian eroticism had been erased. Yet she reconciled herself to the film, which was nominated for 11 Academy awards. Its detractors included the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan and film director Spike Lee, and a Coalition Against Black Exploitation, which picketed the Oscars. In White's view, it was "ridiculous that black people who had never picketed for better schools were picketing Alice. It was extremely wounding to Alice; she said if she'd endured that criticism at an earlier stage in her career, it would have stopped her from writing." For Walker it was "very painful to have people say I didn't like black men, when I'd spent so much time trying to understand them. My grandfathers were terrible but became doting, indulgent, sweet old men. I wanted to know what changed them."
The Temple of My Familiar (1989), a "romance of the last 500,000 years", ranged from California to England and Africa in an alternative history of the world centred on Lissie, an elderly black woman with many past incarnations. For Margaret Busby in Third World Quarterly, it paid homage to the African oral tradition, while "reclaiming tribal spirituality... from the colonising influence of religion". Nicci Gerrard in the Observer, however, was among sceptics who felt Walker had forsaken the "threatening politics of race and gender" for a "soggy new-age spirituality". "There are people outside my community who are charmed by the early work, but I don't have to live there," says Walker. "For many years I thought of myself as a southern writer, but that's not true now." White sees the commercial success of The Color Purple as having exacted a price. "People forgot how she fought racism in the South; suddenly she's a Hollywood success and a hippy tree-hugger."
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) explored the psychic devastation of a woman who has undergone a clitoridectomy, a practice Walker first heard of as a student in Kenya. She also part-funded British director Pratibha Parmar's film Warrior Marks (1993), a Channel 4 documentary on female genital mutilation. Though it was made in collaboration with campaigners from Gambia and Senegal, Walker was censured for interfering in African cultures. According to Parmar, "When people said, 'leave our culture alone; who are you to do this?', Alice would reply, 'I'm a woman'." Parmar sees Walker as pivotal in forcing debate on a practice affecting 100 million women and girls worldwide. "Alice's speaking out on TV gave others courage. Agencies that in the past said it was a 'cultural' issue, and too sensitive to handle, were forced to take a position on it as an issue of human rights."
Walker had a crisis in the mid-90s, enervated by undiagnosed Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection that can precede arthritis, and hit by her mother's death in 1993 and the end of her relationship with Allen. She also acknowledged her bisexuality, or "homospirituality". "I always loved women and men, but I had to understand that," she says. "I'd fall in love with couples. I can't understand why more people don't just love the spirit and what it arrives in." She adds, "I've never understood why people hide. You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss."
Walker prefers to live alone. Her current partner, William Poy Lee, a Chinese- American architect turned lawyer whom she met at a local meditation centre, lives down the hill. But monogamy, she says, "works best for me. For a short period when I was accepting my bisexuality I had a woman and a man as lovers; it was exciting - but exhausting." Walker, says White, "waits to see what's delivered in her life; she's not in pursuit of projects or romantic partners, or hampered by woes that she doesn't have love. Every one of her ex-lovers remains in her life. I felt from them an absolutely pervasive sense of love for her."
Her relationship with her daughter may have been more strained. In her memoir, Black, White and Jewish (2001), Rebecca portrays her mother as negligent, self- absorbed and often absent. "There's a maternal gene she doesn't have," she said then. "It was painful to realise that, in her opinion, I'd failed her as a mother," says Walker. "I felt I did my best to bring her up to be the person she is: well-educated, smart, challenging of authority. I brought her up the way my mother did me - to stand on my own feet, not to accept subservience."
Rebecca, co-founder of an organisation of young feminists, America's Third Wave, is expecting a child. Walker, though gladdened by the prospect, says she already feels a grandmotherly "responsibility to help take care of the world". Her mother took in children, and "in African-American southern culture there's a feeling you can always help. I've tried to do that, but there's a limit. I've been active for 45 years. I may move to the position of a sage who retires to the mountains and is never heard from again."
Jackie Kay, for whom Walker's early work is her best, says, "writing is initially a small, private thing you do without knowing anybody will read you. Once you have certain knowledge of readers there's a danger of becoming precious, of thinking everybody's waiting on your words - that you're a healer or sage imparting wisdom." Zinn stresses that Walker's "radical political convictions and ferocious criticism of American foreign policy haven't been muted by her moving in high circles". She refused an invitation to the Clinton White House in protest against the Cuban trade embargo, and led a delegation of women with $5 million worth of antibiotics, donated by US pharmaceutical companies, to Cuban clinics. "Alice does that work quietly," says Parmar, who says she has also supported individual women fleeing family violence.
"I love learning more than almost anything," says Walker, who recently took up African drums. "I'm fairly fearless about entering into relationships or travelling because, for me, it's about curiosity." She enjoys walking and swimming in the sea. "I hang out with my sweetheart: dancing, eating, driving around looking at the water." Music is the art she most envies, and she cooperated on the musical of The Color Purple . Its director, Gary Griffin, associate director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, has restored the reconciliation between Celie and her abuser, and the sexual passion between Celie and Shug that was "soft-pedalled in the movie". He says: "It's not in response to the controversy; that's the story Alice told."
Her New York agent, Wendy Weil, says Walker "never tells me when she's going to send me a manuscript; it just arrives on my desk". It is a creative freedom Walker cherishes, mindful of forebears who had little choice in their lives. "Generations of people have suffered and died so that I could be this free," she says. "You're always evolving if you let yourself."
Alice Walker
Born: February 9 1944; Eatonton, Georgia.
Educated: 1961-63 Spelman College; '64-65 Sarah Lawrence College.
Married: 1967 Melvyn Leventhal (one daughter, Rebecca), '76 div.
Career: 1970s contributing editor, Ms; '68-82 teaching, Jackson State, Wellesley colleges; '84-88 publisher, Wild Trees Press.
Some Poetry: '84 Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful; 2003 Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.
Some fiction: 1970 The Third Life of Grange Copeland; '73 In Love and Trouble; '81 You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down; '82 The Color Purple; '89 The Temple of My Familar; 2000 The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart; '04 Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart.
Some non-fiction: 1974 Langston Hughes, American Poet; '83 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.
· Now is the Time to Open Your Heart is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £12.99.