Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth

Examine the dramatic life of writer/activist Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. Her story is told with poetry and lyricism, and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover, Quincy Jones, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Sapphire and Walker herself.

In this archival footage, Alice Walker reads from what she calls "the God section" of her novel "The Color Purple." She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel. The text is from a letter the novel's protagonist, Celie, writes to her sister about a conversation she had about God.

Zora Neale Hurston's embrace of black culture and language was an inspiration to Alice Walker. "I realized that unless I came out with everything I had supporting her, there was every chance that she would slip back into obscurity," Walker says of the Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist.

In this web exclusive video, Alice Walker talks about how her father loved education and read everything he could find, even though he was only educated through grade 4 or 5 and lived a life of poverty working on a plantation. Walker recalls the day he put her on a segregated bus to go to Spelman College, where she had earned a scholarship.

The late Howard Zinn gave one of his final interviews for the first film biography of Alice Walker, "Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth." Zinn first met Walker when she became his student at Spelman College. In this web exclusive outtake from the film, Zinn likens Alice Walker to Zora Neale Hurston, Walker's "hero," saying Walker was not afraid to offend either whites or blacks. She was honest.

"It's not possible to separate Alice from her work," says writer and feminist Gloria Steinem. "Of anyone I've ever known or could possibly imagine, she's the most true .... When people used to ask me in the early days 'What is Alice Walker really like?' I always said, 'She's exactly like you think. There is not a private self and a public self.'" This outtake interview is a web exclusive.

In this film outtake, actor and activist Danny Glover speaks about Alice Walker's literary work in the context of her continuous activism, beginning with the Civil Rights Movement in the South, where she was born and raised.

Alice Walker's great-great-great-great-grandmother was a slave who journeyed on foot with two babies on her hips, from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia, which is considered Walker's ancestral home. In memory of that walk, Walker chose to keep and embrace her maiden name, Walker.

Alice Walker on creativity: "Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it. You did it just the way you had to do it, and that is what makes us us."