Brooks, Gwendolyn 1917—

Gwendolyn Brooks 1917—

Poet, novelist

At a Glance…

First Black to Win a Pulitzer Prize

Black Consciousness Influenced Poetry

Selected writings

Sources

A leading contemporary American poet and the first black writer to be honored with a Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks is acclaimed for her technically accomplished and powerful portraits of black urban life. Throughout a career that has spanned six decades and includes both poetry and fiction, the prolific Brooks is noted for her carefully wrought and insightful portraits of everyday black life, in which she illuminates racism, poverty, intraracial prejudice, and personal alienation. Brooks is also known as one of the most wide-ranging of contemporary black poets; while her earlier work is marked by social realism contained in masterful poetic form, technique, and language, her later efforts display a more open, free-verse style and are increasingly direct in exploring themes like social protest, revolution, and black nationalism. Brooks has been praised throughout her career for the complexity and technical skill of her work, which she combines with a compassion for the ordinary that speaks 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.”

Much of Brooks’s work is set in her native Chicago, where she has lived since she was an infant. 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

At a Glance…

Full name, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks; born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, KS; daughter of David Anderson (a janitor) and Keziah Corrine (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Wims) Brooks; married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., September 17, 1939; children: Henry Lowington III, Nora. Education: Graduated from Wilson Junior College, 1936.

Poet and novelist. Publicity director, NAACP Youth Council, Chicago, IL, 1937-38; poetry instructor at numerous colleges and universities c. 1963-69, including Elmhurst College, Northeastern Illinois State College, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin—Madison; poet laureate of Illinois, beginning 1968; distinguished professor of the arts, City Col lege of the City University of New York, 1971 ; poetry consultant to Library of Congress, 1985-86.

Awards: Midwestern Writers Conference poetry award, 1943; Patron Saints Award, Society of Midland Authors, 1945; named one often “Women of the Year,” Mademoiselle, 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, 1949, and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 1950, both for Annie Allen; Robert F. Ferguson Memorial Award, Friends of Literature, 1964, for Selected Poems; Thormod Monsen Literature Award, 1964; Anisfield-Wolf Award, 1968, for In the Mecca; Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award, 1971 ; Shelley Memorial Award, 1976; Essence Award, 1988; inductee, National Women’s Hall of Fame, 1988; Frost Medal, Poetry Society of America, 1989; lifetime achievement award, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1989.

Addresses: Home —7428 South Evans Ave., Chicago, IL 60619.

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 encouraged Brooks to study the Modernist poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e. e. cummings, to, in his words, “cultivate the highest possible standards of self-criticism.” Johnson 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. The poet 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 would gain national attention.

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’ 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.”

First Black to Win a 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 marriage, and most often her own mind and heart as she struggles to be 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, according to the Lattins: “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 writes 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.”

Black Consciousness Influenced Poetry

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 in Black World summarized Brooks’s overall stature as a poet: “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 has been noted for maintaining a level of objectivity which, however specific and direct her subject matter, gives her poetry a universal appeal. According to Blyden Jackson in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Brooks offers “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.”

In addition to her own writing, Brooks is active in promoting and encouraging the work of other poets. In her native Illinois, where she was named poet laureate in 1968, Brooks has organized numerous poetry competitions, often offering prize money from her own funds. She has 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.

Selected writings

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.

Other

Maud Martha (novel), Harper, 1953.

The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (contains A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, Maud Martha, The Bean Eaters, and In the Mecca), 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.

Also author of short stories. Contributor to numerous anthologies. Contributor of poems, articles, and reviews to periodicals.

Sources

Books

Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.

Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, Gale, 1989.

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.

Contemporary Poets, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, Gale, 1980.

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, 1988.

A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

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.

Miller, R. Baxter, Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, University of Tennessee Press, 1986.

Shaw, Harry F., Gwendolyn Brooks, Twayne, 1980.

Tate, Claudia, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983.

Periodicals

Black World, September 1971.

CLA Journal, March 1987.

Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Summer 1984.

MELUS, Fall 1983.

MidAmerica, Volume 12, 1985.

New York Times Book Review, January 7, 1973.

Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter, 1969.

—Michael E. Mueller