Gwendolyn Brooks( 1917 - 2000 )

Her Life:

Her parents were descendants of slaves who had migrated west. Her father's father was a runaway slave and soldier in the Civil War. Brooks's own father, David Brooks, was one of twelve children, and the only one of his family to graduate from high school. With hopes of becoming a doctor, he attended Fisk University for one year, then dropped out and married in 1916. Keziah Corinne Wims, Brooks's mother, was a schoolteacher at the time of her marriage, and had trained as a concert pianist. With the birth of her daughter, however, she became a homemaker. David Brooks's professional dreams were likewise sacrificed to the need of earning a living, and, settling in Chicago, he became a janitor for a music company.

Brooks thus grew up in a nurturing and cultured environment (if a poor one). From the age of seven, Brooks was writing poems and was encouraged in the pursuit especially by her mother who told her young daughter that one day she would be a poet. Brooks also read eagerly and widely, taking as early inspiration the works of Wordsworth, Keats, and Longfellow

She never realized the power of race until she began school. There she experienced racism for the first time, and intra-racial prejudice at that. Spurned by other black children because she lacked athletic ability, light skin, and what was considered good-grade hair, Brooks turned to writing at age 11 as a solace.

Her first published poem, "Eventide," appeared in American Childhood when Brooks was only thirteen, and by age seventeen she was publishing poems regularly in the Chicago Defender.

By the time Brooks graduated from high school she was under the influence of more modern poets, such as Eliot, Pound and Cummings, as well as those of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Her early poems, while mostly heartfelt adolescent poems of love, already displayed a budding racial consciousness.

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.

After a number of her poems had been published in Chicago's black newspapers, Brooks sent 19 poems to a list of publishers. "I said to myself, I'm going to go straight down that list until somebody takes these poems," she said.

Harper & Bros., now HarperCollins, was at the top of the list. Its editors suggested she needed more poems, then published the collection in 1945 in a book called "A Street in Bronzeville."

"Annie Allen" followed four years later. Lanston Hughes wrote of "Annie Allen that "the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks' book are alive, reaching, and very much of today." In 1950, Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen, the award's first black recipient. She became something of an institution in Chicago thereafter, widely interviewed and always in demand for public readings. The following year her daughter was born, and the family settled in a new house in Chicago.

Brooks often referred to her works as her family, which also included black people in general. "If you have one drop of blackness blood in you -- yes, of course it comes out red -- you are mine," she said. "You are a member of my family." But she was quick to point that she wasn't exclusionary, noting that she had the liveliest interest in other families.

Brooks was known as a tireless teacher, promoter and advocate of creative writing in general and poetry in particular. She traveled to libraries, schools, hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers and prisons, reading her work and encouraging appreciation of the written word.

She used her prestige as Illinois' poet laureate to inspire young writers, establishing the Illinois Poet Laureate Awards in 1969 to encourage elementary and high school students to write. She said she found it intoxicating and exciting to see young talent. She would attend poetry slams in Chicago, where aspiring poets would line up to read their works, and she often financed awards to the poet voted the best reader by the audience.

Brooks once said of the awards she received, including having a bronze sculpture of her placed in the National Portrait Gallery, that there was only one that meant a great deal to her: "In December 1967, at a workshop called the Kumuba Workshop in a rundown theater in Chicago, I was given an award for just being me, and that's what poetry is to me -- just being me."

Advice to her own two children, included in her autobiography, could also form a fitting end to Brooks's life and work: "First of all, do not lose faith in yourself. Remember: unhappiness eventually becomes something else--as does everything.... Be pleased with the things in life that are called little. The talk of birds. The first light of morning.... Mostly keep your head up high. (Sometimes lower it, to cry.).... I need not advise you to remember that you are black. The society will see to it that you remember.... 'Lastly,' little life-lines taped to my closet wall. One--and the chief of them: 'When handed a lemon, make lemonade."

In her entry in Who's Who in America, she provides the following as a statement of her personal philosophy: "To be clean of heart, clear of mind, and claiming of what is right and just." These are principles that she has unswervingly embodied and honored both in her writing and in the the living of her life.

Her Books:

A Street in Bronzeville is Gwendolyn Brooks' first published volume of poetry. She had begun writing poems in high school during the 1930s and at the age of seventeen started to submit her writing to "Light and Shadows," the poetry column of the Chicago Defender. A Street in Bronzeville established her as a talented poet with her tales of everyday life in the African American neighbor-hoods of Chicago expressed in traditional poetic forms.

With Annie Allen she examined the coming of age of a young black woman. Through the course of several poems, Brooks follows Annie's development from romantic youth to realistic adult.

This collection of Brooks' poems, her second, solidified her position among the rising young poets in America when she was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.

She was the first African American poet to receive this award.

Brooks' only novel is the story of a young black woman who leaves behind romantic dreams to enter into the realistic life of a woman and mother. She suffers prejudice within her own race because of the darkness of her skin. Maud's concern is not so much that she is inferior but that she is perceived as being ugly." Maud finally takes a stand for her own self-respect, dealing with a racist store clerk. Brooks "suggests a positive way of life that can help one maintain one's self respect in the face of the racism and death which surround one.... In Maud Martha, Brooks has created a female character unique for the time period."

Brooks examined the experience of urban youth in mid-century America. The poems in Bronzeville Boys and Girls "show a rare sensitivity to the child's inner life--the wonderments, hurts, and sense of make-believe and play,"

This is a collecttion of thirty-four short poems about children. Each poem contains the name of a child. This child is either the subject of the poem, or the person delivering it. Taken as a whole, the book feels like nothing so much as a slightly updated series of nursery rhymes. Take, for example, this poem entitled, "John, Who Is Poor". "Give him a berry, boys, when you may/ And, girls, some mint when you can/ And do not ask when his hunger will end/ Nor yet when it began".

These poems acknowledge the struggles that all children, regardless of race, face in the world's poverty laden big cities. Though most the poems have an element of whimsy or light-heartedness to them, many are socially conscious. The boy who does not receive what he wants for Christmas reflects, "To frown or fret would not be fair/ My Dad must never know I care/ It's hard enough for him to bear".

The Bean Eaters was Brooks' first book of poems since being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen. The style still tends toward the traditional but in some poems signals the new direction her work was to take towards a more direct, socially pointed outlook.

This classic volume shows her compassionate and illuminating response to a world that is both special and universal, and her warm humanity.

Click here to see an explanation of the poem, "We Real Cool" and the poem, "Sadie and Maude" that appear in Selected Poems.

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 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.

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).

Gwendolyn Brooks delivers an exceptional volume once again, and she speaks to the young(er) poets who have so much to share with the world. Brooks' vision for fledgling poets is encouraging and full of hope. This is a wonderful volume full of direction and inspiration for the poet within.

This book is a collection of poems, short stories, a novel, highlights from several decades of excellent writing.

These are poems that feel quiet, calm, much like the demeanor she displayed when she was alive. However she can communicate anger, depression , anguish, without hitting you across the head with it.

A reprint from The Bean Eaters

Much harder to find.

The book is written in fragments that combine to form a remarkable image. We learn about Gwendolyn Brooks through her reflections on those around her, and revel in the beautiful prose and poetry she bestows on the reader.

A great read for anyone even remotely interested in this wonderful poet!

Brooks prepared this new-and-selected volume shortly before her death; The first part, published in Ebony in 1971, has never appeared in book form. That praises Alabama's civil rights workers, incorporating their speech and giving the flavor and the micro-history of that important period as few other poets could.

It includes the pivotal, and critically admired, long poem "In the Mecca" (1968), a harrowing narrative set in a Chicago housing project. The rest of the book collects poems from Brooks's later phase, many of them about or addressed to the young. "Children Coming Home" consists of short, moving verse-monologues by boys and girls from Chicago's South Side.