WATCH: Alice Walker's American Masters

Most people know lesbian author Alice Walker because of The Color Purple, but the writer, who turns 70 this year, has produced a prodigious body of work since then. Now is a chance to learn more whenAlice Walker: Beauty in Truth premieres nationwide tonight, February 7 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Not only that, she rescued fellow African-American author Zora Neale Hurston's from obscurity. "Her work had a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings and that was crucial to me as a writer," Walker explains.

"Alice Walker was absolutely instrumental in allowing a much larger audience to even know about Hurston," according to Jennifer DeVere Brody. "I think at the time, 1979, when she did her first essay on Hurston, all of Hurston's books were out of print."

Watch this clip below: