73 pages 2 hours read

Alice Walker

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1983

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Key Figures

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston appears frequently in these essays, both as subject and side note, and is clearly a formative figure for Walker. Walker admires her not only for her fiction writing—she considers her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, to be an underrated 20th century classic—but for her work as an anthropologist and her independent and irreverent spirit. Walker explains that she first encountered her writing while working on a short story that involved voodoo practitioners; the existing studies that she found, mostly by white men, all struck her as simplistic and condescending. Only Hurston’s work seemed to treat the subject with both the respect and the fondness that it deserved.

Hurston is important to Walker as a role model, but also for her connection to the South (she grew up in an all-black community in Eatonville, Florida, the subject of much of her writing). Much as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also did for Walker, Hurston’s writing served to return the South to her. Walker writes of showing Hurston’s work to exiled Southern relatives in Boston, and how it caused them to recognize themselves and their ancestors:

For what Zora’s work did was this: it gave them back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed (told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents—not one of whom could not tell a story to make you weep, or laugh) and showed how marvelous, indeed priceless, they were (85).

Related Titles

By Alice Walker

Plot Summary

logo

By the Light of My Father's Smile

Alice Walker

By the Light of My Father's Smile

Alice Walker

Study Guide

logo

Everyday Use

Alice Walker

Everyday Use

Alice Walker

Plot Summary

logo

Possessing the Secret of Joy

Alice Walker

Possessing the Secret of Joy

Alice Walker

Plot Summary

logo

Strong Horse Tea

Alice Walker

Strong Horse Tea

Alice Walker

Study Guide

logo

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

Study Guide

logo

The Flowers

Alice Walker

The Flowers

Alice Walker

Study Guide

logo

The Temple of My Familiar

Alice Walker

The Temple of My Familiar

Alice Walker

Plot Summary

logo

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker

Plot Summary

logo

The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart

Alice Walker

The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart

Alice Walker

Study Guide

logo

To Hell with Dying

Alice Walker

To Hell with Dying

Alice Walker