These journals are a revelation a road map and a gift to us all' TAYARI JONES author of An
American Marriage From the acclaimed author Alice Walker - winner of the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize - comes an unprecedented compilation of four decades' worth of journals
that draw an intimate portrait of her development as an artist intellectual and human rights
activist. In Gathering Blossoms Under Fire Walker offers a passionate intimate record of her
intellectual artistic and political development. She also intimately explores - in real time -
her thoughts and feelings as a woman a writer an African American a wife a daughter a
mother a lover a sister a friend a citizen of the world. In an unvarnished and singular
voice she writes about an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot
soldiers of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. or 'the King' as she
called him her marriage to a Jewish lawyer partly to defy laws that barred interracial
marriage in the 1960s South an early miscarriage the birth of her daughter writing her first
novel the trials and triumphs of the women's movement erotic encounters and enduring
relationships the 'ancestral visits' that led her to write The Color Purple winning the
Pulitzer Prize being admired and maligned in sometimes equal measure for her work and her
activism burying her mother and her estrangement from her own daughter. The personal and the
political are layered and intertwined in the revealing narrative that emerges from Walker's
journals.
