While students might initially be uncomfortable when first encountering certain themes in The Color Purple, virtually all of them are drawn into this compelling novel with its transcendent ending.  Most famous for this, her seminal novel, writer/activist Alice Walker soon will be 70 and to celebrate, WGBY airs American Masters’ Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth on February 7 at 9pm.

Born February 9, 1944, into a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, Alice Walker came of age during the violent racism and seismic social changes of mid-20th-century America.  Her mother, poverty and participation in the civil rights movement were the formative influences on her consciousness, becoming the inherent themes in her writing.

The first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Walker continues to shine a light on global human rights issues. Her dramatic life is told with poetry and lyricism, and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover, Quincy Jones, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Sapphire and Walker herself.