Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

‘These journals are a revelation, a road map and a gift to us all’ – Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

‘Walker writes beautifully about the push and pull of intimacy . . . You find yourself admiring her idealism, her gift as a writer and her abundant appetite for life’ – The Telegraph

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire presents four decades' worth of personal journals to offer a passionate, intimate record of Alice Walker's intellectual, artistic and political development.

Walker writes in an unvarnished and singular voice about an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with civil rights foot soldiers, marrying a Jewish lawyer and defying 1960s anti-interracial marriage laws, writing her first novel, experiencing the trials and triumphs of the women's movement, being both admired and maligned for her work and activism, burying her mother and estrangement from her daughter. Her journals reveal an inextricable intertwining of the personal and political, exploring her thoughts and feelings in real time as a woman, writer, African American, wife, daughter, mother, lover, sister, friend and citizen of the world.