Margaret Walker Alexander; Black Feminist Author

Margaret Walker Alexander, a black feminist author, poet, teacher and literary expert best known for her 1966 novel “Jubilee,” has died. She was 83.

Alexander, who lived in Jackson, Miss., died Monday of breast cancer in Chicago while visiting one of her children.

The writer first attracted literary attention in 1942 when her book of poetry, “For My People,” won the Yale Younger Poets Series Award. She was the first black woman in the United States to be honored in a prestigious literary competition.

A quarter of a century later, “Jubilee” was greeted by critics and scholars as the first historical black American novel. It was also the first work by a black author to champion liberation for black women.

Alexander’s writings, epitomized in “For My People” and “Jubilee,” were considered visionary in their focus on a new cultural unity for black Americans. Her emphasis on expanding the lives of black women helped earn her the Feminist Press Literary Award in 1989.

“Jubilee,” set in Georgia during the Civil War, described the life of the daughter of a slave and a white plantation owner. The book’s heroine was based on one of Alexander’s ancestors.

Alexander, among other authors, sued the late writer Alex Haley, contending that his 1976 best-selling “Roots” contained parts “largely copied” from her novel “Jubilee.” Haley countered that, although he thought highly of Alexander, he had never read her novel. Alexander’s case was thrown out of court.

In 1989, Alexander published a biography of Richard Wright, “Daemonic Genius,” about the black author of the seminal 1940s novels “Native Son” and “Black Boy.” Although other biographers had published earlier books on Wright, Alexander told The Times she was “forced” to write her account by observers who noted she was one of the few surviving writers who had known the young Wright.

After two decades of work on the biography, she chose her title because of her view that Wright’s early life of Southern poverty made him “demonic.”

“This anger or rage,” she said, “drove him to create and to achieve.”

Alexander herself enjoyed a more comfortable childhood as the daughter of a Methodist minister and a music teacher. Born in Birmingham, Ala., she earned a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Iowa.

She worked briefly as a social worker, a newspaper reporter and magazine editor and then took up her life work of teaching English--first at Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C., and then West Virginia State College.

Alexander moved to Jackson State College in Jackson, Miss., in 1949 and taught there for 30 years. She was also director of the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black Peoples at Jackson State from 1968 until 1979. The institute was later renamed for her.

A widow, Alexander is survived by her four children, Marion, Firnist, Sigismund and Margaret.