J.M. Coetzee , in full John Maxwell Coetzee (born February 9, 1940, Cape Town, South Africa), South African novelist, critic, and translator noted for his novels about the effects of colonization. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Coetzee was educated at the University of Cape Town (B.A., 1960; M.A., 1963) and the University of Texas (Ph.D., 1969). An opponent of apartheid, he nevertheless returned to live in South Africa, where he taught English at the University of Cape Town, translated works from the Dutch, and wrote literary criticism. He also held visiting professorships at a number of universities.

Dusklands (1974), Coetzee’s first book, contains two novellas united in their exploration of colonization, The Vietnam Project (set in the United States in the late 20th century) and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (set in 18th-century South Africa). In the Heart of the Country (1977; also published as From the Heart of the Country; filmed as Dust, 1986) is a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a Boer madwoman, and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), set in some undefined borderland, is an examination of the ramifications of colonization. Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which won the Booker Prize, concerns the dilemma of a simple man beset by conditions he can neither comprehend nor control during a civil war in a future South Africa.

Coetzee continued to explore themes of the colonizer and the colonized in Foe (1986), his reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee’s female narrator comes to new conclusions about power and otherness and ultimately concludes that language can enslave as effectively as can chains. In Age of Iron (1990) Coetzee dealt directly with circumstances in contemporary South Africa, but in The Master of Petersburg (1994) he made reference to 19th-century Russia (particularly to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s work The Devils); both books treat the subject of literature in society. In 1999, with his novel Disgrace, Coetzee became the first writer to win the Booker Prize

Ossie Davis was a twentieth century renowned African-American film and television artist and Broadway actor. Besides that, he was also known for his work as a playwright, poet and author. Being an actor and author, Davis had a sensitive side which made him conscious of social problems faced by his race which he tried to bring to light as a social activist.

Davis was named Raiford Chatman Davis on his birth. He was born on December 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia. He came to known as Ossie when a country clerk mistaken R. C for Ossie upon his birth. As it was a regular occupation for white people to threaten and bully the blacks, Davis family was no less a victim of this cruelty. His father was threatened to be shot for occupying such a major work post for a black man. Despite facing the extreme racism, Davis had been able to attend school and was later sent to Howard University. However, he dropped out in 1939 in order to follow his dream career of acting but not before he finished a course at Columbia University School of General Studies.

1939 was the year when he first embarked upon his eight decade long journey of his acting career. He had to face the similar problems as all the black community did when they made any meaningful career choice, such as strong resistance from white. They were allowed to play only stereotypical and low-profile characters. Nevertheless, Davis had different plans as he wanted to play something significant following the example of Sidney Poitier. The struggle for a major role was inevitable for a beginner like himself so he was offered roles like that of a butler or porter. In order to make a difference, he took on whatever small roles came his way very seriously and made them non-stereotypical.

After experiencing career as an actor, he aspired to become a director. Eventually, Ossie Davis became one of the stellar directors of his time along with Melvin Van Peebles, and Gordon Parks. He is credited with directing some notable films including the famous action film

Baseball Hall of Fame inducts Leroy Satchel

Paige.

Born in Eatonton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, Alice Walker partly spent her life working as a teacher, lecturer and social worker but is primarily known as a writer today. Daughter to a maid and sister to 7 siblings, Walker spent her childhood with little money. She suffered a serious eye injury at the age of 8 by being shot by a BB pellet while playing with her brothers. A white scar around her right eye made her really self-conscious and led her to isolate herself from much of the world. However, she engaged herself in reading and writing poetry that soon became her source of enjoyment.

Till high school, Walker studied in a segregated institution and became the valedictorian of her batch. She then went to Spelman College in Atlanta having received a scholarship. Later, she transferred to New York where she studied at the Sarah Lawrence College. One of her years was spent in Africa as part of an exchange programme. 1965 marked an important year in her life as she graduated from college and also published her first short story.

Post-graduation, Walker worked as a teacher, lecturer and social worker. She fought for equal rights being given to African American and used the Civil Rights Movement as a medium to achieve this goal. In 1968, her first collection of poetry, Once, got published.

However, today she is primarily known for writing novels and her first work by the name of Third Life of Grange Copeland got published in 1970. She experimented with different types of writing ranging from short stories including In Love and Trouble to children’s books including Langston Hughes: American Poet.  She also played a pivotal role in the Black Feminist Movement going on at the time. In 1983, she coined the term womanism to mean Black feminism.

She got married in 1967 to Melvyn Leventhal who was a lawyer and an activist. They had one daughter, Rebecca (born 1969). However, the couple got divorced in 1976.

She rose to fame in 1982 with her third novel, The Color Purple, which highlighted the struggles of an African

Death of poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (33), Dayton, Ohio.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American poet and author born on June 27, 1872. His parents had been slaves during the American Civil War but had been freed by the time of his birth. Dunbar was born in Ohio, and his parents separated shortly after his birth. Dunbar began writing poetry as early as six years of age. He was an avid poet and started publicly reciting his poetry at the age of nine. His mother assisted him in his school work, and learned to read and write solely to aid her son’s education. She often read the Bible to him and hoped that he would eventually become a minister. Dunbar was the only African American student at his high school. He was a well-liked and popular student, and was the head of the school’s literary society, editor of the school newspaper and a member of the debate club.

In 1888, at the age of 16, Dunbar published two poems titled “Our Martyred Soldiers” and “On the River” in a Dayton based newspaper called “The Herald”. Two years later, he wrote and edited the first edition of a weekly African American paper called “The Tattler”. It was printed by his high school classmates Wilbur and Orville Wright, who would go on to invent the first airplane. The paper only lasted for six weeks but it gave Dunbar good exposure to the literary world. Paul Laurence Dunbar completed his high school education in 1891 and had hoped to study law. However, being unable to afford it at the time, he took a job as an elevator operator instead, drawing a salary of $4 per week. He continued to write poetry and asked his friends, the Wright brothers, to publish his book of poems, who in turn referred him to United Brethren Publishing House. His first book of poems, titled “Oak and Ivy” was published by them in 1893. He would sell subsidized copies of the book to passengers in the elevator in order to recover the cost of investment.

His work caught the attention of another poet James Whitcomb Riley, among others, who offered to put him through college. However, Dunbar wanted to focus exclusively on

Alice Walker , in full Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944, Eatonton, Georgia, U.S.), American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly on women.

Walker was the eighth child of African American sharecroppers. While growing up she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores. She received a scholarship to attend Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College. After graduating in 1965, Walker moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights movement. She also began teaching and publishing short stories and essays. She married in 1967, but the couple divorced in 1976.

Walker’s first book of poetry, Once, appeared in 1968, and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a narrative that spans 60 years and three generations, followed two years later. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman, both appeared in 1973. The latter bears witness to sexist violence and abuse in the African American community. After moving to New York, Walker completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s.

Walker later moved to California, where she wrote her most popular novel, The Color Purple (1982). An epistolary novel, it depicts the growing up and self-realization of an African American woman between 1909 and 1947 in a town in Georgia. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985. A musical version produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones premiered in 2004.

Walker’s later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar, an ambitious examination of racial and sexual tensions (1989); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a

Author Ralph Ellisons novel Invisible Man wins the National Book Award

The first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Alice Walker was born the eighth child of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Walker became the valedictorian of her segregated high school class, despite an accident at age eight that impaired the vision in her left eye. Before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College, where she received a B.A. degree, she attended Atlanta’s Spelman College for two years, where she became a political activist, met Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.

Also, during her undergraduate studies, Walker visited Africa as an exchange student. She later registered voters in Georgia and worked with the Head Start program in Mississippi, where she met and married civil rights attorney Melvyn Rosenthal (the marriage lasted ten years), became the mother of daughter Rebecca, and taught at historically black colleges Jackson State College and Tougaloo College. Walker has also taught at Wellesley College, University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of California at Berkeley, and Brandeis University.  At Brandeis she is credited with teaching the first American course on African American women writers.

Walker continued working in the civil rights movement while teaching at various universities.  During this time she also became a major voice in the emerging feminist movement led by mostly white middle-class women. Aware of the issues of race in that movement, Walker later created a specific black woman centered feminist theory, which she called “womanism,” to identity and assess the oppression based on racism and classism that African American women often experience.

Walker’s collected work includes poetry, novels, short fiction, essays, critical essays, and children’s stories. Her collections of poems includes: Once (1968), Revolutionary Petunias And Other Poems (1973), Horses Make A Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), and Absolute Truth in the Goodness of the Earth:

1944 Novelist Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia.

Shanks, the only child of educators David Sylvestus and Eliza Balfour Shanks, was born on February 9, 1902 in Round Rock, Texas.

Bernard Harris, African-American astronaut, takes

space walk.