Previously in Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman totally did it.

There are precious few things in life worth knowing; the fact that celebrated American novelist Alice Walker and legendary folk singer Tracy Chapman had a romantic relationship in the middle of the 1990s is one of them. What. Yes. Hi. What. No. Yes. In a way, somehow I think I have always known. For a period of several years, the woman who wrote “Fast Car” and the woman who wrote The Color Purple regularly held hands and made out and arranged their dinner plans together, because we live in a world of great joy that delights in presenting the sorry, tired masses of humanity with improbable, perfect combinations.

This is the sort of fact that is not nearly as widely known as it ought to be. Tracy Chapman, it is true, in addition to looking like the lady fox from Robin Hood come to grinning, blushing life, is also a reserved and private sort of person, who does not go about regularly trumpeting the fact that she has known a Pulitzer prizewinner biblically, but it is nonetheless true and we ought to wake our own romantic partners up with a reminder of it every day.