Jubilee/Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker: A Creative Survivor
Jubilee was the crowning an achievement of Margaret Walker's career. A sprawling novel about Civil War-era blacks, the novel is simultaneously a preservation of Walker's family history and a historically accurate portrayal of slavery life for many blacks of the times.
On a more personal level, the novel is a testament to Walker as a creative survivor, which she discusses in her essay "How I Wrote Jubilee." The essay shows Margaret Walker as a creative survivor in three ways. First, though her dedication and diligence she kept the Jubilee project alive over a span of many years, fighting adversity, setbacks and practical concerns to finish the project and allow her creative vision to survive. Secondly, Jubilee is the representation of the survival of Walker's heritage; the novel is her creative way of preserving not only the history of her family but also the history of black Americans in the face of historical whitewashing. Finally, in "How I Wrote Jubilee" Walker shows how important the creative process is to her own personal survival; it is the lens through which she sees the world and without her creative outlets, she herself could not survive.
The novel Jubilee seemed to come to fruition in spite of many forces that seemed to doom the project to failure, and in fact, its very existence is an example of Walker's determination to keep her creativity alive.
The first obstacle came when Walker was in graduate school and wanted to make the Jubilee project her masters thesis, "but once again my poetry was chosen" (Walker 52). Having problems with the writing of Jubilee, walker time and again turned to her poetry as her main creative focus throughout school. Later, these problems arose again while she was at Yale as a Ford Fellow.
By the beginning of May I had two hundred pages of manuscript, but...
Walker Jubilee Vyry In Margaret Walker's novel Jubilee the main character Vyry, the daughter of a plantation owner and his black mistress in the Civil War Era South, is a creative survivor. Vyry's innate intelligence and strength help her to both survive and flourish, despite the terrible challenges that she faces throughout her life. As a child, Vyry is defined by her illegitimate birth and mother's death. In the second section
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