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The neighborhood called Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, was neither the first nor the worst toxic waste dump, but it became a national story in the late 1970s thanks to the organizing efforts of Lois Gibbs, who fought to protect Love Canal's children, ...

Alice Walker has been defined as one of the key international writers’ of the 20th century. Walker made history as the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature as well as the National Book Award in 1983 for her novel “The Color Purple,” ...

In this film outtake, actor and activist Danny Glover speaks about Alice Walker's literary work in the context of her continuous activism, beginning with the Civil Rights Movement in the South, where she was born and raised.

The late Howard Zinn gave one of his final interviews for the first film biography of Alice Walker, "Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth." Zinn first met Walker when she became his student at Spelman College. In this web exclusive outtake from the film, Zinn likens ...

In this web exclusive video, Alice Walker talks about how her father loved education and read everything he could find, even though he was only educated through grade 4 or 5 and lived a life of poverty working on a plantation. Walker recalls the day ...

Playing fast and loose with the Six Degrees of Separation game, American Masters looks into its archives to see what the great American writer J.D. Salinger has in common with the lives and careers of 11 other American Masters. Salinger was a fan of Judy ...

Touching a nerve in readers and critics alike, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger's first novel, was "a very revolutionary book for the America of the early 1950's," according to Elizabeth Frank, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and professor of Modern Languages and Literature at ...

Actor and producer Edward Norton shares his memories of reading The Catcher of Rye as an adolescent, and his analysis of the character Holden Caulfield and the way author J.D. Salinger uses dialogue and narrative in the novel. Watch Film Outtake of Salinger "The first ...

In this film outtake from Salinger, writer David Shields discusses the relationship between Salinger's writing and his grisly experience of World War II, where he faced both the D-Day landing and the atrocities at a subcamp of the concentration camp Dachau. Watch Film Outtake of ...

J.D. Salinger served in the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in the field in Europe during World War II. Watch Film Excerpt from Salinger Salinger could speak both French and German and his work involved interviewing enemy prisoners and civilians. He formed a strong ...