Walker, Margaret Abigail
Walker, Margaret Abigail( 1915– ),born in Birmingham and educated at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1940; Ph.D., 1965). Walker was the youngest African-American woman to win a prestigious national award for literature with For My People (1942), which received the Yale Younger Poets Series Award. It is a book of ballads, sonnets, and free verse, tales of folk heroes and heroines, and it established her reputation as well as being a commercial success. Her reputation as a poet rests also on Prophets for a New Day (1970), informed by religious faith, in which Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and others are tandemed with Bible characters. Finally, Walker's reputation also is anchored on a book that was 30 years in the writing–the historical novel Jubilee (1965), about a slave family during and after the Civil War. The book was originally inspired by bedtime stories of “the slave time” told...
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