Q 01/05

Alice Walker was born in which US state?

A) Mississippi

B) Georgia

C) Alabama

D) Louisiana

Answer · why

B) Georgia

Georgia. She grew up in the farm town of Eatonton, the eighth and youngest child in her family, and later set The Color Purple in the same countryside...

Q 02/05

How did the eight-year-old Alice Walker lose the sight in her right eye?

A) A farm tool accident

B) A brother's BB gun

C) A bout of measles

D) A car crash

Answer · why

B) A brother's BB gun

A brother's BB gun. It happened in a game of cowboys and Indians; teased about the scar, she withdrew into books and began writing poetry on her own.

Q 03/05

Which radical professor, fired in 1963, mentored the young Alice Walker?

A) Noam Chomsky

B) Howard Zinn

C) Herbert Marcuse

D) John Hope Franklin

Answer · why

B) Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn. Her college dismissed him for siding with student protesters; Walker left that year too, and Zinn went on to write A People's History of ...

Q 04/05

Alice Walker left home in 1961 on a state scholarship for which historically Black college?

A) Morehouse

B) Howard

C) Spelman

D) Fisk

Answer · why

C) Spelman

Spelman. The scholarship came to her as class valedictorian, and as a student there she was invited to the home of Martin Luther King Jr.

Q 05/05

Which one-word title did Alice Walker give her first book, a 1968 collection of poems?

A) Sula

B) Cane

C) Once

D) Beloved

Answer · why

C) Once

Once. She wrote most of the poems in her final year at college, taking Japanese haiku as one of her models, and the book came out four years later.