Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker Alexander (July 7, 1915–November 30, 1998) born Margaret Abigail Walker was an American novelist, biographer, essayist, and poet most known for her novel Jubilee. She finished elementary school by the age of eleven and graduated from high school by fourteen to attend the University of New Orleans. She received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University before attending the University of Iowa for graduate school, receiving a master’s in 1940 and a doctorate in 1965. She and her husband, Firnist James Alexander, had four children. Alexander’s most critically acclaimed work is her only novel, Jubilee (1966). Jubilee won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award and breathed new life into her career, igniting new academic interest in her poetry. Alexander’s other literary endeavors include Prophets for a New Day (1970), October Journey (1973), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974). She also published two collections of essays, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays of Life and Literature (1990) and On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932–1992 (1997). In Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), Alexander offers a biography of her famous friend and literary contemporary. Alexander also dedicated herself to education, serving as a professor of English at Jackson State University for thirty years before retiring in 1979.
Text Source: Mississippi Encyclopedia
Archives
Margaret Walker Center, Jackson State University →
Correspondence with Richard Wright, Yale University (Beinecke) →
Digital Resources
Margaret Walker Digital Archive, Jackson State University →
Black Women Oral History Project, Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Archival Connections, Yale University (Beinecke) →