The book that collects these journal entries was edited by Valerie Boyd, a writing professor at the University of Georgia and the author of an acclaimed biography of the writer Zora Neale Hurston, whose work Walker championed. Boyd died earlier this year.īeyond the personal insights, heartbreaks and triumphs they cover, Walker’s journals track a life that has intersected with some of the most significant issues of 20th-century America. She was active in the civil rights movement and had an illegal abortion in the 1960s.

She and her now ex-husband, Melvyn Leventhal, who is white and Jewish, moved to Mississippi the same summer the Supreme Court outlawed state bans on interracial marriage. Walker had romantic relationships with men and women and wrote candidly about the evolution of her sexual identity. magazine for a few years in the 1970s, and she is credited with creating the term “womanist,” which she defined at the beginning of her essay collection “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” published in 1983: The rights and the power of women are themes throughout Walker’s writing. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.”įrom the black folk expression of mothers to female children, ‘You acting womanish,’ i.e., like a woman.