About the Author

Shortly after her birth in Kansas, on June 7, 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks's family moved to Bronzeville, a predominantly black district in Chicago's South Side. There the Brooks family lived for all of Gwendolyn's childhood and adolescence. Living in this area provided Brooks with her sources, images, and direction as a poet. According to family lore, Brooks began writing poetry at the age of seven. Her mother, Keziah, found her filling a page with two-line verses, causing her family to predict that she would follow in the footsteps of renowned black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Brooks's mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged her daughter to read widely and to continue writing. Brooks's brother took over many of her household chores so that she would have time for her creative work. Her father, David, also provided inspiration: his habit of singing and reciting poetry filled the household with cadences that Brooks began to weave into her own lines and verses.

Brooks recalls that from the age of eleven she kept notebooks regularly, partly because of her family's encouragement but also because of her need for a private life of the mind to which she could escape from the harsh realities of her school days. She felt particularly keenly the taunting she received, from black classmates as well as white, because her skin was dark and her hair tightly curled. This theme surfaces in many of her poems and in her one novel, Maud Martha. In her autobiography, Report from Part One, Brooks describes her experiences in elementary school:

One of the first "world" truths revealed to me when I at last became a member of SCHOOL was that to be socially successful, a little girl must be Bright (of skin). It was better if your hair was [...] at least Good Grade (Good Grade implied, usually, no involvement with the Hot Comb)--but Bright you marvelously needed to be. (37)

As she moved into her teenage years, Brooks found herself uncomfortable at parties and excluded from the whirl of social events and extracurricular activities that seemed the essential core of her peers' lives. In response, she spent nearly all her free hours alone in her room, writing, reading, and thinking deeply about the world she saw each day as well as about the inner world she developed through her growing intimate acquaintance with novels, poems, and essays. Her 1949 long poem "TheWomanhood" reflects her perception that the young black men she met preferred black women whose skin was light and whose features were close to the "ideal image" of white women who appeared on the covers of popular magazines.

When she was sixteen, she wrote to poet James Weldon Johnson, sending him some of her poems to critique. He responded with encouragement and suggested that she read the works of modern poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e.e. cummings and continue her reading of the works of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Johnson himself. About a year later, Brooks met both Johnson and Hughes at poetry readings at local churches. Hughes was particularly supportive; reading her poems on the spot, he pronounced her talented and encouraged her to go on with her writing. Hughes continued to be a mentor and years later wrote reviews of her work and published her poems in a Chicago-area publication for which he wrote a column.

Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936; in the early 1940s she participated in a poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center, continuing her study of the major modernist poets whom Johnson had recommended to her and working on her own poetic technique. In 1939, she married Henry Blakely and later became the mother of two children. During the early years of their marriage, Blakely and Brooks lived in a two-room kitchenette apartment that Brooks acknowledged as a prime source for her poetry: "If you wanted a poem," she writes in her autobiography, "you had only to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing" (69). "kitchenette building", and "The Mother", which appeared in her first published book, A Street in Bronzeville, reflect this time.

In 1949, Brooks published her second work, Annie Allen, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Considered her most experimental work, this long poem shows a young black woman as she comes of age, hoping to live out her childhood dreams, which are threatened by poverty and racism. Critics praised Brooks for her use of traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet and ballad, that integrated the cadences of colloquial speech with the rhythms of formal language. Brooks herself, however, had ambivalent feelings about Annie Allen, noting that it is a book that appeals primarily to "certain academy-oriented critics" and that causes many aspiring young black poets to consider her "a tool of the Establishment" and to look on her "with admiration and anxiety" (quoted by Charles Whitaker in "Gwendolyn Brooks--a Poet for All Ages," Ebony, June 1987, p. 214).

The Bean Eaters, a collection published in 1960, contains some of Brooks's finest poems. Written during the height of the civil rights movement, the poems bring to life the people Brooks depicts. In the title poem, for example, she shows an aging couple whose lives have grown predictable, yet who continue to find strength by "remembering.../ Remembering, with twinklings and twinges."

Brooks marked 1967 as a pivotal year in her life. In Report from Part One, she says, "It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction" (45). She goes on to note, "Until 1967, my own blackness did not confront me with a shrill spelling of itself. I knew that I was what most people were calling 'a Negro'; I called myself that, although always the word fell awkwardly on a poet's ear" (83). Suddenly, however, Brooks confronted the concept of a New Black consciousness (the capital letters are hers) at the spring 1967 Fisk University Writers' Conference. Here the air was electric with New Black voices, and Brooks describes herself as walking around in amazement, listening, looking, and learning (84-85). Over the next few years, Brooks tried to define for herself a new awareness based not on an integrationist theme but on a separate vision of African-American culture. During those years, she said, she worked at "trying to weave the coat that I shall wear" (85). She described her remarkable change in consciousness in these words:

I--who have "gone the gamut" from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun--am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress. I have hopes for myself. (86)

After this watershed time, Brooks's career, poetry, and energies took many new directions. One example was her decision to allow only independent African-American presses to publish her work. Another was her determined support of young writers: beginning in 1970, in her role as poet laureate of Illinois, she funded out of her own pocket annual awards to young Illinois poetry writers. Until her death in 2000, she continued to celebrate life, to assert hope, and to honor courage. Her 1986 poem "To the Young Who Want to Die" provides an example of her post-1967 poetic vision and demonstrates her conviction that "poetry is life distilled."

Major works by Brooks

A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
Annie Allen (1949)
Maud Martha (1953, novel)
The Bean Eaters (1960)
In the Mecca (1968)
Riot (1969)
Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972, autobiography)
The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)
To Disembark (1981)
Blacks (1987)
Children Coming Home (1991)

Brooks and the Web

Visit the homepage of the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center to learn more about Brooks and her legacy in the Chicago area.

Would you like to read more by Brooks? Read her poem, "we real cool" on the website of the Academy of American Poets. Then, listen to Brooks read her verse.

To learn more about Gwendolyn Brooks' contributions to literature, click on this link to read her obituary in the New York Times.

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