Gwendolyn Brooks

• Born: 7 June 1917
• Birthplace: Topeka, Kansas
• Died: 3 December 2000
• Best Known As: The first African American to win a Pulitzer for poetry

Gwendolyn Brooks was a Chicago poet, the poet laureate of Illinois and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Brooks's first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945 to widespread critical acclaim. Her 1949 collection, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer for poetry; she was the first black poet, male or female, to win the prize. During her long and celebrated career she taught at a number of colleges, raised a family and published poems, a novel (1953's Maud Martha) and three books of memoirs. In 1968 she succeeded Carl Sandburg as the poet laureate of Illinois, a post she held until her death. Her poetry collections include Selected Poems (1963), Riot (1969), The Near Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986) and Blacks (1987).

Brooks, Gwendolyn (b. 1917), poet, novelist, and children's writer. Although she was born on 7 June 1917 in Topeka, Kansas—the first child of David and Keziah Brooks—Gwendolyn Brooks is “a Chicagoan.” The family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth, and despite her extensive travels and periods in some of the major universities of the country, she has remained associated with the city's South Side. What her strong family unit lacked in material wealth was made bearable by the wealth of human capital that resulted from warm interpersonal relationships. When she writes about families that—despite their daily adversities—are not dysfunctional, Gwendolyn Brooks writes from an intimate knowledge reinforced by her own life.

Brooks attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, but transferred to the all-black Wendell Phillips, then to the integrated Englewood High School. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continues to influence her work.

Her profound interest in poetry informed much of her early life. “Eventide”, her first poem, was published in American Childhood Magazine in 1930. A few years later she met James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, who urged her to read modern poetry—especially the work of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings—and who emphasized the need to write as much and as frequently as she possibly could. By 1934 Brooks had become an adjunct member of the staff of the Chicago Defender and had published almost one hundred of her poems in a weekly poetry column.

In 1938 she married Henry Blakely and moved to a kitchenette apartment on Chicago's South Side. Between the birth of her first child, Henry, Jr., in 1940 and the birth of Nora in 1951, she became associated with the group of writers involved in Harriet Monroe's still-extant Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. From this group she received further encouragement, and by 1943 she had won the Midwestern Writer's Conference Poetry Award.

In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (published by Harper and Row), brought her instant critical acclaim. She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine's “Ten Young Women of the Year,” she won her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time to the present, she has been the recipient of a number of awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane Letters.

President John Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962. In 1985 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Just as receiving a Pulitzer Prize for poetry marked a milestone in her career, so also did her selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the 1994 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.

Her first teaching job was a poetry workshop at Columbia College (Chicago) in 1963. She went on to teach creative writing at a number of institutions including Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin.

A turning point in her career came in 1967 when she attended the Fisk University Second Black Writers’ Conference and decided to become more involved in the Black Arts movement. She became one of the most visible articulators of “the black aesthetic.” Her “awakening” led to a shift away from a major publishing house to smaller black ones. While some critics found an angrier tone in her work, elements of protest had always been present in her writing and her awareness of social issues did not result in diatribes at the expense of her clear commitment to aesthetic principles. Consequently, becoming the leader of one phase of the Black Arts movement in Chicago did not drastically alter her poetry, but there were some subtle changes that become more noticeable when one examines her total canon to date.

The ambiguity of her role as a black poet can be illustrated by her participation in two events in Chicago. In 1967 Brooks, who wrote the commemorative ode for the “Chicago Picasso,” attended the unveiling ceremony along with social and business dignitaries. The poem was well received even though such lines as “Art hurts. Art urges voyages…” made some uncomfortable. Less than two weeks later there was the dedication of the mural known as “The Wall of Respect” at 43rd and Langley streets, in the heart of the black neighborhood. The social and business elites of Chicago were not present, but for this event Gwendolyn Brooks wrote “The Wall”. In a measure these two poems illustrate the dichotomy of a divided city, but they also exemplify Brooks's ability both to bridge those divisions and to utilize nonstrident protest.

Gwendolyn Brooks has been a prolific writer. In addition to individual poems, essays, and reviews that have appeared in numerous publications, she has issued a number of books in rapid succession, including Maud Martha (1953), Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), and In the Mecca (1968). Her poetry moves from traditional forms including ballads, sonnets, variations of the Chaucerian and Spenserian stanzas as well as the rhythm of the blues to the most unrestricted free verse. In short, the popular forms of English poetry appear in her work; yet there is a strong sense of experimentation as she juxtaposes lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms. In her lyrics there is an affirmation of life that rises above the stench of urban kitchenette buildings. In her narrative poetry the stories are simple but usually transcend the restrictions of place; in her dramatic poetry, the characters are often memorable not because of any heroism on their part but merely because they are trying to survive from day to day.

Brooks's poetry is marked by some unforgettable characters who are drawn from the underclass of the nation's black neighborhoods. Like many urban writers, Brooks has recorded the impact of city life. But unlike the most committed naturalists, she does not hold the city completely responsible for what happens to people. The city is simply an existing force with which people must cope.

While they are generally insignificant in the great urban universe, her characters gain importance—at least to themselves—in their tiny worlds, whether it be Annie Allen trying on a hat in a milliner's shop or DeWitt Williams “on his way to Lincoln Cemetery” or Satin-Legs Smith trying to decide what outlandish outfit to wear on Sundays. Just as there is not a strong naturalistic sense of victimization, neither are there great plans for an unpromised future nor is there some great divine spirit that will rescue them. Brooks is content to describe a moment in the lives of very ordinary people whose only goal is to exist from day to day and perhaps have a nice funeral when they die. Sometimes these ordinary people seem to have a control that is out of keeping with their own insignificance.

Although her poetic voice is objective, there is a strong sense that she—as an observer—is never far from her action. On one level, of course, Brooks is a protest poet; yet her protest evolves through suggestion rather than through a bludgeon. She sets forth the facts without embellishment or interpretation, but the simplicity of the facts makes it impossible for readers to come away unconvinced—despite whatever discomfort they may feel—whether she is writing about suburban ladies who go into the ghetto to give occasional aid or a black mother who has had an abortion.

Trying to determine clear lines of influence from the work of earlier writers to later ones is always a risky business; however, knowing some identifiable poetic traditions can aid in understanding the work of Gwendolyn Brooks. On one level there is the English metaphysical tradition perhaps best exemplified by John Donne. From nineteenth-century American poetry one can detect elements of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. From twentieth-century American poetry there are many strains, most notably the compact style of T. S. Eliot, the frequent use of the lower-case for titles in the manner of e. e. cummings, and the racial consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance, especially as found in the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes; but, of perhaps greater importance, she seems to be a direct descendant of the urban commitment and attitude of the “Chicago School” of writing. For Brooks, setting goes beyond the Midwest with a focus on Chicago and concentrates on a small neglected corner of the city. Consequently, in the final analysis, she is not a carbon copy of any of the Chicago writers.

She was appointed poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and has been perhaps more active than many laureates. She has done much to bring poetry to the people through accessibility and public readings. In fact, she is one of our most visible American poets. Not only is she extremely active in the poetry workshop movement, but her classes and contests for young people are attempts to help inner-city children see “the poetry” in their lives. She has taught audiences that poetry is not some formal activity closed to all but the most perceptive. Rather, it is an art form within the reach and understanding of everybody—including the lowliest among us. In 1994, Gwendolyn Brooks received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and was named by the National Endowment for the Humanities as its Jefferson Lecturer.

Bibliography

• Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One, 1972.
• Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith, eds., A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, 1987.
• George E. Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1990.
• Stephen Caldwell Wright, ed., On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplations, 1996

Kenny Jackson Williams

For more information on Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, visit Britannica.com.

Gwendolyn Brooks (born 1917) was the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and is best known for her intense poetic portraits of urban African Americans.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. The eldest child of Keziah (Wims) Brooks, a schoolteacher, and David Anderson Brooks, a janitor who, because he lacked the funds to finish school, did not achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. Brooks grew up in Chicago and, according to George Kent, was "spurned by members of her own race because she lacked social or athletic abilities, a light skin, and good grade hair." She was deeply hurt by this rejection and took solace in her writing. She became known to her family and friends as "the female Paul Lawrence Dunbar" and received compliments on her poems and encouragement from James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, prominent writers with whom she initiated correspondence and whose readings she attended in Chicago. By the age of sixteen, she had compiled a substantial portfolio, consisting of over 75 poems.

Early Career

After graduating from Wilson Junior College in 1936, she worked briefly at "The Mecca," a Chicago tenement building. She participated in poetry readings and workshops at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center, producing verse that would appear in her first published volume, A Street in Bronzeville in 1945.

In 1939 she married Henry L. Blakeley, and together they would raise two children: Henry, Jr., and Nora. When she married she became a housewife and mother. But instead of directing her creative energy entirely to domestic chores, Brooks wrote poetry when the children were asleep or later while they were in school. In this way she wrote several collections of poetry, which constitutes her early work: A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen (1949), The Bean Eaters (1960), and Selected Poems (1962). During this time she also wrote a novel, Maud Martha (1953).

The work of this period is characterized by her portraits of urban African American people involved in their day-today activities and by her technical form, lofty diction, and intricate word play. Critics have frequently labeled her early work as intellectual, sophisticated, and academic. Although these poems sing out against social and sexual oppression, they are frequently complex and, therefore, in need of close textual reading to uncover their protest and Brooks' own social commentary. In many of these works she criticized the color prejudice which African American people inflict on one another by calling attention to their tendency to prefer light-skinned African American people. In Annie Allen and Maud Martha she examined the conventional gender roles of mother and father, husband and wife, and found that they frequently stifle creativity out of those who try to live up to artificial ideals. But this social criticism tends to be pushed back into the complicated language.

In recognition of these works, in 1950, Brooks was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and became the first African American to be granted this honor.

New Tone

In 1967, Brooks' work achieved a new tone and vision. She simplified her technique so that her themes, rather than her techniques, stood in the forefront. This change can be traced to her growing political conscienceness, previously hinted at in Selected Poems, after witnessing the combative spirit of several young African American authors at the Second Black Writers' Conference held at Fisk University that year. These works include: In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Aloneness (1971), Family Pictures (1971), the autobiographical Report from Part One (1972), The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves: Or, What You Are You Are (1974), Beckonings (1975), and Primer for Blacks (1980). These works are much more direct, and they are designed to sting the mind into a higher level of racial awareness. Foregoing the traditional poetic forms, she favored free verse and increased the use of her vernacular to make her works more accessible to African Americans and not just academic audiences and poetry magazines.

During the 1970s, Brooks taught poetry at numerous institutions for higher learning, including Northeastern Illinois State College (now Northeastern Illinois University), University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the City College of the City University of New York. She continued to write, and while her concern for the African American nationalist movement and racial solidarity continued to dominate her verse in the early-1970s, the energy and optimism of Riot and Family Pictures were replaced in the late-1970s with an impression of disenchantment resulting from the divisiveness of the civil rights and "Black Power" movements. This mood was reflected in Beckonings (1975) and To Disembark (1980), where she urged African Americans to break free from the repression of white American society and advocated violence and anarchy as acceptable means.

Later, Brooks spent her time encouraging others to write by sponsoring writers' workshops in Chicago and poetry contests at correctional facilities. In 1985, she was named as the consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress. In short, she has taken poetry to her people, continuing to test its relevance by reading her poetry and lecturing in taverns, barrooms, lounges, and other public places as well as in academic circles.

In later years Brooks continued to write, with Children Coming Home (1992) and Blacks (1992). In 1990 Brooks' works were ensured a home when Chicago State University established the Gwendolyn Brooks Center on its campus. She continued to inspire others to write, focusing on young children by speaking and giving poetry readings at schools around the country.

In 1997, on the occasion of her 80th birthday, she was honored with tributes from Chicago to Washington D.C. Although she was honored by many, perhaps the best description of Brooks' life and career came from her publisher, Haki Madhubuti, when he said, "She is undoubtedly one of the top 100 writers in the world. She has been a chronicler of black life, specifically black life on the South Side of Chicago. She has become almost a legend in her own time."

Honors

In addition to her Pulitzer Prize, Brooks has been awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1946), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1946 and 1947), a Poetry magazine award (1949), a Friend of Literature Award (1963), a Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1971), a Shelley Memorial Award (1976), an Essence Award (1988), a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America (1989), a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989), a Jefferson Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1994), as well as some 49 honorary degrees from universities and colleges, including Columbia College in 1964, Lake Forest College in 1965, and Brown University in 1974. Moreover, she was named poet laureate of Illinois in 1969 and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1988. In 1985 she reached the pinnacle of her career when she became the poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, the second African American and the first African American woman to hold that position.

Further Reading

The best source of biographical information is Brooks' own autobiography, Report from Part One (1972). Critical information on Brooks includes Don L. Lee "The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks," in Black Scholar (Summer, 1972); Gloria T. Hill "A Note on the Poetic Technique of Gwendolyn Brooks," in College Languages Association Journal (December, 1975); Suzanne Juhasz "A Sweet Inspiration … of My People: The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni," in Naked and Fiery Forms (1976); Hortense J. Spillers "Gwendolyn the Terrible: Propositions on Eleven Poems," in Shakespeare's Sisters (1979); George E. Kent "Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," in Black American Literature and Humanism, edited by R. Baxter Miller (1981); Mari Evans "Gwendolyn Brooks," in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980 (1983); and Claudia Tate "Gwendolyn Brooks," in Black Women Writers at Work (1983).

Further biographical information on Brooks can found in Shirley Henderson "Our Miss Brooks on Eve of Her 80th Birthday, Poet Offers Some Answers," in the June 6, 1997 issue of the Chicago Tribune and in Heather Lalley "Paying Tribute to Illinois' Poet Laureate as Brooks Turns 80, City Finds Words to Describe Her Power to Inspire," in the June 5, 1997 issue of the Chicago Tribune. Her life and works are also the subject of George E. Kent A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (1990).

poet; novelist; college teacher

Personal Information

Born Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, KS; died December 3, 2000; daughter of David Anderson (a janitor) and Keziah Corrine (a schoolteacher) Brooks; married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., September 17, 1939 (died 1996); children: Henry Lowington III, Nora.
Education: Wilson Junior College, 1936.

Career

Poet and novelist. NAACP Youth Council, publicity director, Chicago, IL, 1937-38; poetry instructor at numerous colleges and universities; City College of the City University of New York, distinguished professor of the arts, 1971; Library of Congress, poetry consultant, 1985-86; Jefferson Lecturer for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement in Humanities, 1994; American Academy of Poets, fellow, 2000.

Life's Work

A leading contemporary American poet and the first black writer to be honored with a Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks was acclaimed for her technically accomplished and powerful portraits of black urban life. Throughout a career that spanned six decades and included both poetry and fiction, the prolific Brooks was noted for her carefully wrought and insightful portraits of everyday black life, in which she illuminated racism, poverty, interracial prejudice, and personal alienation. Brooks was also known as one of the most wide-ranging of contemporary black poets; while her earlier work was marked by social realism contained in masterful poetic form, technique, and language, her later efforts displayed a more open, free-verse style and were increasingly direct in exploring themes like social protest, revolution, and black nationalism.

Brooks was praised throughout her career for the complexity and technical skill of her work, which she combined with a compassion for the ordinary that spoke universally to many readers. She commented to Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work that she would prefer not to be known as an "intellectual," explaining: "I do write from the heart, from personal experience and from the experiences of other people whom I have observed. Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words. That word-play is what I have been known for chiefly."

Began Writing at an Early Age

Much of Brooks's work is set in her native Chicago, where she lived from her infancy until her death. Her path to becoming a writer started with her parents, who early on encouraged her in reading and writing. Her father, David, regularly told her stories and read aloud from his set of Harvard Classics, while her mother, Keziah, a schoolteacher, composed songs for her children and commissioned Brooks to write plays for the children of a church group she led. When Brooks's parents discovered she had promising writing abilities, they relieved her of many household duties and her father set up a working desk for her. As a young girl Brooks read widely and especially admired L. M. Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" books, in addition to the poems of black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. Fascinated with words, she would spend many hours composing rhymes and poems and record them in a notebook. Confident of her talent, her mother, as Brooks related in her 1972 autobiography, Report From Part One, assured her that one day she would become the "lady Paul Laurence Dunbar."

Brooks published her first poem when she was 13 in a popular children's magazine called American Childhood. When she was 16 she had the opportunity to meet James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, two of the most famous poets of the 1920s literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Brooks's mother had prompted her to send samples of her work to Johnson and Hughes; they both assured her that she indeed possessed talent and urged her to continue writing and studying poetry.

Johnson, who encouraged Brooks to study the Modernist poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e. e. cummings, served, as Gary Smith noted in MELUS, as Brooks's "literary mentor," yet Hughes, with whom Brooks would later become great friends, was an even more profound influence. As Brooks described in Report From Part One, "The words and deeds of Langston Hughes were rooted in kindness, and in pride. His point of departure was always a clear pride in his race.... Mightily did he use the street. He found its multiple heart, its tastes, smells, alarms, formulas, flowers, garbage and convulsions. He brought them all to his table-top. He crushed them to a writing-paste. He himself became the pen." Smith commented that "Hughes underscored the value of cultivating the ground upon which [Brooks] stood," and convinced her "that a black poet need not travel outside the realm of his own experiences to create a poetic vision and write successful poetry."

While in high school Brooks focused heavily on her writing and study of poetry, and was a regular contributor of poems to the Defender, a black daily newspaper in Chicago. Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936 with a degree in English and went on to work for Chicago's NAACP Youth Council, where she met her future husband, himself an aspiring writer. In 1941 her writing received a boost when she enrolled in a workshop led by Inez Cunningham Stark, a wealthy writer and scholar who traveled to Chicago's predominantly black south side to instruct aspiring poets. Brooks drew much from the comments and criticism of her peers in the workshop and was introduced by Stark to a wealth of contemporary poetry. Brooks wrote in Report From Part One that, while Stark guided the group in the principles of poetry, their own voices were allowed to develop: "If, in spite of everything that she could tell us, we stubbornly clung to our own ways and words, and we often so clung, she bowed gracefully and let us alone, trusting to time to further instruct us, or trusting to the possibility that she herself might be wrong." Throughout the early 1940s Brooks developed a substantial local reputation for her poetry, and, in 1943, received a poetry award from the Midwestern Writers Conference. Soon thereafter her work gained national attention.

Published First Book of Poetry

Around 1943 Brooks submitted a manuscript of "Negro poems" to Harper & Row, who published them in 1945 as A Street in Bronzeville. The poems received wide critical acclaim and Brooks was hailed as a major new voice in contemporary poetry. Drawn from scenes and characters in Brooks's Chicago neighborhood, A Street in Bronzeville offers insight into the aspirations and struggles of ordinary black people. The first section of the book depicts life in the Bronzeville neighborhood, while the second section--a sequence of twelve sonnets entitled "Gay Chaps at the Bar"--explores prejudice against blacks serving in the Armed Forces during World War II. Demonstrating a mastery of the sonnet, quatrain, and ballad, Brooks was praised for her high level of craft, innovative and distinctive use of idiom and imagery, and fresh glimpse into the lives of blacks.

George E. Kent noted in Black World that Brooks's first book revealed obsessions which would characterize all of her poetry. "Brooks revealed in her first book considerable technical resources, a manipulation of folk forms, a growing sense of how traditional forms must be dealt with if the power of the Black voice is to come through with integrity. A Street in Bronzeville...committed its author to a restless experimentation with an elaborate range of artistic approaches." William H. Hansell similarly noted in CLA Journal that A Street in Bronzeville demonstrated "Brooks's commitment to a concept of art which she has never surrendered: the artist must work with the materials most familiar to him, with his own milieu."

Won Pulitzer Prize

Following the success of A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks received a Guggenheim fellowship and was named by Mademoiselle magazine as one of their "Ten Women of the Year." Brooks received even greater honors with her next book of poetry, Annie Allen, which won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, marking the first time the award had been bestowed upon a black writer. A complex sequence of poems that trace the coming-of-age of a black woman, Annie Allen is, according to Claudia Tate in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, a "collection of rigorously technical poems, replete with lofty diction, intricate word play, and complicated concatenations of phrases." George Kent in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation described the highly crafted poems as "an attempt to give artistic structure to tensions arising from the artist's experience in moving from the Edenic environment of her parents' home into the fallen world of Chicago tenement life in the roles of young wife, mother, and artist." Regarding the centerpiece poem of the collection, "The Anniad," Brooks said in an interview reprinted in Report From Part One that she was "very interested in the mysteries and magic of technique" and that she "wanted every phrase to be beautiful, and yet to contribute sanely to the whole...effect."

Established as a poet, Brooks next ventured to write her first and only novel, Maud Martha, which was published in 1953. Like Annie Allen the novel focuses on the life of a young black woman and, as with all of Brooks's poetry, scrutinizes the ordinary and everyday to illuminate larger issues and themes. Patricia H. and Vernon E. Lattin in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction noted that "Maud's stage is the home in which she grew up, the schools she attended, the kitchenette where she lives after creative and to be an individual in a gray, oppressive world."

On a different scale than sweepingly dramatic black novels like Richard Wright's Native Son, Maud Martha has been largely overlooked. Lattin and Lattin wrote, "With a very loose organization consisting of a series of short vignettes, and with lyrical language never far from poetry, this short novel has a deceptively light and simple exterior which belies the complexity of the interior." David Littlejohn in Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, similarly called Maud Martha accomplished, "a striking human experiment, as exquisitely written and as effective as any of Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry."

In her 1960 book of poems, The Bean Eaters, Brooks continued "to portray the immediate environment and ordinary people and events," noted Hansell. The book also, however, showed Brooks becoming more direct in her concern about black social issues. In The Bean Eaters Brooks wrote about the integration of the Little Rock, Arkansas, school system, the lynching of blacks in the South, and the misguided efforts of cultured whites to help blacks.

Due to its timing--The Bean Eaters appeared just as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum--and political overtones, the book received mixed reviews. Maria K. Mootry reported in A Life Distilled that "some reviewers found The Bean Eaters sufficient in content and form, while others found it too tame in its protest mission; still others were upset and put off by what they deemed an unseemly social emphasis." Brooks's thematic transition in The Bean Eaters was also reflected in a further evolution in her poetic style, which Kent described as a "bolder movement into a free verse appropriate to the situation."

Influenced by Next Generation of Black Writers

In 1967 Brooks attended a writers' conference at Fisk University and became acquainted with a group of young writers, including John Killens, Ron Milner, and LeRoi Jones, who were advocating a new perspective for black authors. She commented to Tate on this new breed of black writers: "They seemed proud and so committed to their own people....The poets among them felt that black poets should write as blacks, about blacks, and address themselves to blacks." Their message took hold of Brooks and profoundly influenced the direction of her poetry.

Beginning with her 1968 book of poetry, In the Mecca, Brooks displayed what Toni Cade Bambara called in the New York Times Book Review "a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style." The title poem of In the Mecca, set in an inner-city apartment building, traces a mother's search for her missing daughter among the tenants, only to discover in the end that the little girl has been murdered. The Virginia Quarterly Review called the poem "both an impressionistic and naturalistic journey through a huge ghetto apartment house, through the black precincts of despair." R. Baxter Miller in Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960 deemed In the Mecca "a most complex and intriguing book; it seeks to balance the sordid realities of urban life with an imaginative process of reconciliation and redemption." Other poems in the book treated contemporary black heroes Medgar Evans and Malcolm X; another was dedicated to the Rangers, a Chicago street gang. Frederick C. Stern in MidAmerica called the latter "quite powerful, an appreciation for those outside the system, which comes quite close to being revolutionary."

In a move to support black publishers, Brooks left her longtime publisher Harper & Row, after In the Mecca and chose to have her next several books published by Broadside Press, run by Detroit poet Dudley Randall. Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), and Beckonings (1975) further displayed Brooks's evolution in theme and style. Most noticeably, Brooks began to discuss revolution, black power, and black nationalism and her style became almost totally free verse. Norris B. Clark in A Life Distilled noted a difference from her earlier work in that Brooks's "emphasis shifted from a private, internal, and exclusive assessment of the identity crises of twentieth-century persons to a communal, external, and inclusive assessment of the black communal experience." Brooks described her change in focus to Tate: "What I'm fighting for now in my work, [is] for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project. I don't want to say these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picturemaking I've always been interested in." Critics noted that Brooks was no less masterful in her craft in these later poems, and, as in her earlier work, still focused on the situations of individuals with compassion and understanding.

Kent summarized Brooks's overall stature as a poet in Black World: "Brooks shares with Langston Hughes the achievement of being most responsive to turbulent changes in the Black Community's vision of itself and to the changing forms of its vibrations during decades of rapid change. The depth of her responsiveness and her range of poetic resources make her one of the most distinguished poets to appear in America during the 20th Century." Throughout her writing career Brooks was noted for maintaining a level of objectivity which, however specific and direct her subject matter, gave her poetry a universal appeal. According to Blyden Jackson in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Brooks offered "the close inspection of a limited domain,...a view of life in which one may see a microscopic portion of the universe intensely and yet, through that microscopic portion see all truth for the human condition wherever it is."

Mentored Other Poets

In addition to her own writing, Brooks was active in promoting and encouraging the work of other poets. In her native Illinois, where she was named poet laureate in 1968, Brooks organized numerous poetry competitions, and often offered prize money from her own funds. She visited elementary schools, colleges, prisons, and drug rehabilitation centers, bringing people the art of poetry. In 1985, at the age of 68, she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, the first black woman to be named to the post. Among the many other honors she has received in her distinguished career, The Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature was established at Western Illinois University, and a junior high school in Harvey, Illinois, was named for her.

Brooks continued to write into her seventies and eighties. In 1996 she published a second autobiographical volume, Report From Part Two. The book contained stories as well as poems, in which Brooks reflected on the world around her. During the summer of 2000. Brooks completed work on a new volume of poetry, In Montgomery. However, she would not see the release of this book, slated for publication in 2001, for, in late November of 2000, Brooks was diagnosed with cancer. She died a week later, surrounded by loved ones who took turns reading to her, on December 3rd at the age of 83.

In an interview shortly before her death, Brooks said, as quoted in Jet, "I believe that we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences." She governed her life by this philosophy, sharing so much of herself in her poems and reaching out to mentor budding poets of varying backgrounds. Poet Haki Madhubuti told Jet, "She mentored literally three generations of poets, Black, White, Hispanic, Native American. She was all over the map sharing her gifts." Madhubuti, whose eulogy for Brooks was excerpted in Essence, observed, "She wore her love in her language."

Awards

Midwestern Writers Conference poetry award, 1943; Society of Midland Authors, Patron Saints Award, 1945; Mademoiselle, named one of ten "Women of the Year," 1945; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1946; American Academy of Arts and Letters creative writing award, 1946; Guggenheim fellowship, 1946 and 1947; Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, Poetry, for Annie Allen, 1949; Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for Annie Allen, 1950; Friends of Literature, Robert F. Ferguson Memorial Award, for Selected Poems 1964; Thormod Monsen Literature Award, 1964; Anisfield-Wolf Award, for In the Mecca, 1968; named poet laureate of Illinois, 1968; Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award, 1971; Shelley Memorial Award, 1976; Essence Award, 1988; inductee, National Women's Hall of Fame, 1988; Poetry Society of America, Frost Medal, 1989; National Endowment for the Humanities, Lifetime Achievement award, 1989; National Medal of Arts, 1995; Lincoln Laureate Award, 1997; International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Decent, 1998; National First Ladies Library, "First Women" award, 1999; over 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.

Works

Selected works

• Poetry
• A Street in Bronzeville, Harper, 1945.
• Annie Allen, Harper, 1949.
• Bronzeville Boys and Girls (juvenile), Harper, 1956.
• The Bean Eaters, Harper, 1960.
• Selected Poems, Harper, 1963.
• In the Mecca, Harper, 1968.
• Riot, Broadside Press, 1969.
• Family Pictures, Broadside Press, 1970.
• Aloneness, Broadside Press, 1971.
• (Editor) A Broadside Treasury, Broadside Press, 1971.
• (Editor) Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology, Broadside Press, 1971.
• Aurora, Broadside Press, 1972.
• The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves (juvenile), Third World Press, 1974.
• Beckonings, Broadside Press, 1975.
• Primer for Blacks, Black Position Press, 1980.
• To Disembark, Third World Press, 1981.
• Black Love, Brooks Press, 1982.
• Mayor Harold Washington [and] Chicago: The I Will City, Brooks Press, 1983.
• The Near Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems, The David Co., 1987.
• In Montgomery, 2001.
• Other
• Maud Martha (novel), Harper, 1953.
• The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, Harper, 1971.
• Report From Part One: An Autobiography, Broadside Press, 1972.
• Young Poet's Primer (writing manual), Brooks Press, 1981.
• Very Young Poets (writing manual), Brooks Press, 1983.
• Report From Part Two, Third World Press, 1996.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, Gale, 1989.
• Bloom, Harry, editor. Contemporary Poets, Chelsea House, 1986.
• Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report From Part One: An Autobiography, Broadside Press, 1972.
• Concise Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1941-1968, Gale, 1985.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 4, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 15, 1980; Volume 49, 1989.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, Gale, 1980.
• Evans, Mari, editor. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.
• Jackson, Blyden and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Louisiana State University Press, 1974.
• Kent, George. Gwendolyn Brooks: A Life, University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
• Littlejohn, David. Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, Viking, 1966.
• Madhubuti, Haki R. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, Third World Press, 1987.
• Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, University Press of Kentucky, 1987.
• Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews, University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
• Miller, R. Baxter. Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
• Mootry, Maria K. and Gary Smith, editors. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
• Shaw, Harry F. Gwendolyn Brooks, Twayne, 1980.
• Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983.

• Black Issues in Higher Education, December 21, 2000.
• Black World, September 1971.
• CLA Journal, March 1987.
• Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, summer 1984.
• Essence, March 2001.
• Jet, April 5, 1999; December 18, 2000.
• MELUS, fall 1983.
• MidAmerica, Volume 12, 1985.
• New York Times Book Review, January 7, 1973.
• Poets & Writers, March-April 2000.
• Virginia Quarterly Review, winter 1969.

— Michael E. Mueller and Jennifer M. York

Quotes:

"Poetry is life distilled."

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

Gwendolyn Brooks
Born	Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks June 7, 1917(1917-06-07) Topeka, Kansas, USA
Died	December 3, 2000 (aged 83) Chicago, Illinois, USA
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	United States
Writing period	1930-2000
Genres	Poetry
Notable work(s)	Annie Allen
Notable award(s)	Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950)
Spouse(s)	Henry Blakely (m. 1939)

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.3 Personal life 2 Legacy 3 Bibliography 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Early years

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims, their first child. Her mother was a former school teacher who left teaching for marriage and motherhood, and her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, had given up his ambition to become a doctor to work as a janitor because he could not afford to attend medical school. When Brooks was only six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she grew up.

Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in her schools. She attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, before transferring to all-black Wendell Phillips. Brooks eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. In 1936, she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work.

Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. Her father provided a desk and bookshelves, and her mother took her, when she was in high school, to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.^{[citation needed]}

Career

Gwendolyn Brooks at the Miami Book Fair International of 1985

Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. Aged 17, Brooks stuck to her roots and began submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city. During this same period, she also attended Wilson Junior College, from where she graduated in 1936. After publishing more than seventy-five poems and failing to obtain a position with the Chicago Defender, Brooks began to work a series of typing jobs.

By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. One particularly influential workshop was organized by Inez Cunningham Stark. Stark was an affluent white woman with a strong literary background, and the workshop participants were all African-American. The group dynamic of Stark's workshop proved especially effective in energizing Brooks and her poetry began to be taken seriously (The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Alexander, Editor, 2005). In 1943 she received an award for poetry from the Midwestern Writers' Conference.

Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945 by Harper and Row, brought her instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry,Annie Allen, which won her Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first given to an African-American.

After John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began her career teaching creative writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1967, she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where, she said, she rediscovered her blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca, a book length poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago housing project. In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

In addition to the National Book Award nomination and the Pulitzer Prize, Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. In 1985, Brooks became the Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry, a one year position whose title changed the next year to Poet Laureate. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors for American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. Other awards she received included the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brooks was awarded more than seventy-five honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide. In 1995, she was honored as the first Woman of the Year by the Harvard Black Men's Forum. On 1 May 1996 Brooks returned to her birthplace in Topeka, Kansas. She was the keynote speaker for the Third Annual Kaw Valley Girl Scout Council Women of Distinction Banquet and String of Pearls Auction. A ceremony was held in Brooks’ honor at a local park, located at 37th and Topeka Boulevard.

Personal life

In 1938, Brooks married Henry Blakely and gave birth to two children: Henry Blakely Jr., who was born in 1940, and Nora Blakely, who was born in 1951. After a short battle with cancer, Brooks died on December 3, 2000, aged 83, at her Southside Chicago home. She is buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.

Legacy

• 1995: Gwendolyn Brooks Elementary School, Aurora, Illinois
• 2000: Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, Chicago, Illinois
• 2001: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Harvey, Illinois
• 2002: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Oak Park, Illinois
• 2003: Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library, Springfield, Illinois
• 2002: 100 Greatest African Americans.^[2]
• 2005: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Bolingbrook, Illinois

Bibliography

Negro Hero (1945) The Mother (1945) A Street in Bronzeville (1945) Annie Allen (1950) Maud Martha (1953) (Fiction) Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956) The Bean Eaters (1960) Selected Poems (1963) We Real Cool (1966) In the Mecca (1968) Malcolm X (1968) Family Pictures (1970) Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971) The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971) Aloneness (1971)

Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972) (Prose) A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975) (Prose) Aurora (1972) Beckonings (1975) Black Love (1981) To Disembark (1981) Primer for Blacks (1981) (Prose) Young Poet's Primer (1981) (Prose) Very Young Poets (1983) (Prose) The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986) Blacks (1987) Winnie (1988) Children Coming Home (1991) In Montgomery (2000)

See also

• African American literature
• List of African American firsts

References

1. ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1981-1990". Library of Congress. 2008. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate-1981-1990.html. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 
2. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gwendolyn Brooks

• Gwendolyn Brooks at Find a Grave
• Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks at PoetryFoundation.org
• Audio and Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks at Poets.org
• Some poems by Brooks at the Circle Brotherhood Association
• Gwendolyn Brooks at Modern American Poetry
• "The Book Writers" Poem A poem, patterned after Brooks's "The Bean Eaters" is a dedication to the lives and legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki R. Madhubuti.

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

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