Gwendolyn Brooks

Also known as: Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, Mrs. Gwendolyn Brooks

(1917 - 2000)
Poet

"Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words."

Born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, poet Gwendolyn Brooks is the first African American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. She is best known for her sensitive portraits of urban blacks who encounter racism and poverty in their daily lives. 

One of the major modern poets and the first African American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks has worked at her craft for well over fifty years. While she devoted the first half of her career to producing verse characterized by traditional forms and language, she has spent the second half boldly experimenting with free verse and the urban black vernacular. Her thematic focus, however, has remained much the sameóthe lives of ordinary African Americans and their struggle against the devastating effects of poverty and racism. As George E. Kent noted 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." 

Although she was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and has always considered it her hometown. Her mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, was a schoolteacher, while her father, David Anderson Brooks, was a janitor who had been forced to abandon his dream of becoming a doctor because he didn't have enough money to finish school. The family also included a son, Raymond, who was sixteen months younger than his sister. 

The Brooks household was a happy one, and Gwendolyn thrived on a steady diet of love and encouragement from her parents, who read stories and sang songs to their two children. The outside world, however, was somewhat less supportive. According to Kent, as a youngster Gwendolyn "was spurned by members of her own race because she lacked social or athletic abilities, a light skin, and good grade hair." Hurt by such rejection, the little girl took comfort in the solitary pursuits of reading and writing. She composed her first poem at the age of seven and by the age of eleven was regularly entering her thoughts in a notebook. "I felt that I had to write," she later explained in an Ebony article. "Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge." When her parents discovered her aptitude for writing, they excused her from many household chores and set up a desk at which she could work. 

By the age of sixteen, Brooks had compiled a substantial portfolio, including about seventy-five published poems. After completing high school in 1935, she attended Wilson Junior College and graduated with a degree in English in 1936. Brooks then worked briefly as a cleaning woman and secretary to a "spiritual advisor" who sold potions and charms to residents of the Mecca, a Chicago tenement building. In 1937, she became the publicity director of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council. 

Around 1941, Brooks began taking part in poetry workshops at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center. They were taught by Inez Cunningham Stark, a wealthy writer and scholar from the city's famous "Gold Coast" who had an interest in cultivating the talents of aspiring black poets. She introduced her pupilsómore than a few of whom went on to successful writing careersóto a wide variety of verse, with a particular emphasis on contemporary works, and guided them to an understanding of the principles of poetry. Furthermore, she allowed them to develop their own poetic voices, even if those voices were at odds with what she herself appreciated. "This class of [Stark's] was very alive," Brooks later recalled in her autobiography, Report from Part One. "We were encouraged to tear each other to pieces.... It helped me to have somebody tell me what he thought was wrong with my work, and then bounce the analysis back and forth." Brooks blossomed under this form of instruction and produced poems that soon began to garner a fair amount of attention in and around Chicago. 

In 1943, Brooks won a poetry award from the Midwestern Writers' Conference. Not long afterward, she pulled together a group of her poems and submitted them to Harper & Row for publication. Editors there liked what they saw, and in 1945 the collection appeared under the title A Street in Bronzeville. In its pages, Brooks chronicles the everyday lives, aspirations, and disappointments of ordinary black Americans living in Bronzeville, a Chicago neighborhood that serves as the setting for many of her poems. The first part of A Street in Bronzeville provides a realistic depiction of the area and its residents; the second section explores the unfair treatment of blacks in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. In these poems, Brooks introduced thematic issues that would feature prominently in her works during the next two decadesófamily life, war, the quest for contentment and honor, and the hardships caused by racism and poverty. 

A Street in Bronzeville was met with widespread critical acclaim, and Brooks was lauded as a major new voice in contemporary poetry for her technical expertise, innovative use of imagery and idiom, and fresh perspective on the lives of African Americans. Shortly after its publication, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and Mademoiselle magazine named her one of its "Ten Women of the Year." 

Brooks's second collection of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), garnered even more praise and attention, including the first Pulitzer Prize ever given to a black writer. Similar in structure to a prose narrative, the poems in Annie Allen tell the story of a black woman's journey from childhood to adulthood in an environment marked by poverty and discrimination. Critics generally praised Brooks for her subtle humor and irony, her skillful handling of conventional stanzaic forms, and her invention of the sonnet-ballad, a verse structure that integrates colloquial speech and formal diction. 

Brooks followed up this award-winning effort with an autobiographical novel, Maud Martha (1953), which examines racism, sexism, and classism through the eyes of an African American woman just before, during, and after World War II. Often overlooked, it is, according to several critics, nearly as lyrical and as affecting as any of Brooks's poems. Her next major collection of poetry, The Bean Eaters (1960), deals with the integration of the school system in Little Rock, Arkansas, the lynchings of black men across the South, and the well-meaning but misguided efforts of white liberals to help African Americans. Written during the early years of the civil rights movement, it reflects Brooks's growing interest in social issues. Her poetic style also underwent a transformation of sorts around this time as she began to rely less on traditional forms in favor of experimenting with free verse. 

In 1967, Brooks attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University. Witnessing the energy, confidence, and combative spirit of many of the young authors she met there (including LeRoi Jones, now known as Imamu Amiri Baraka; Larry Neal; Ron Milner; and Don L. Lee, now known as Haki R. Madhubuti) proved to be a life-changing experience. Brooks left the gathering with a new political consciousness and artistic direction shaped by the tenets of black cultural nationalism. As she later explained in the book Black Women Writers at Work, the new generation of black activists and artists she became acquainted with at Fisk "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." As for herself, Brooks noted in her autobiography, "Iówho 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 sunóam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now.... I have hopes for myself." 

With the collection entitled In the Mecca (1968), which most critics regard as a transitional work, Brooks abandoned the traditional poetic forms of her earlier pieces in favor of free verse and increased her use of vernacular to make her poetry more accessible to black readers. Summarizing the differences between her old and new style, the poet herself wrote in Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, "The forties and fifties were years of high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Thenóthe sixties: Independent fire!" In an effort to support black publishers, Brooks also made another major change at this point in her career, leaving her longtime publisher Harper & Row for Broadside Press, a small, Detroit-based company operated by African American poet Dudley Randall. 

Poverty, unfulfilled dreams, and violence figure prominently as themes of In the Mecca, which are based on Brooks's experiences working in the Chicago tenement building known as the Mecca. The title poem, for example, traces a mother's search for her missing daughter, whom she later discovers has been murdered by a fellow resident. Other pieces in the collection are dedicated to slain black activists Medgar Evers and Malcolm X as well as to the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang. 

In Riot (1969) and Family Pictures (1970), Brooks examined the social upheavals of the late 1960s with objectivity and compassion. Writing in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, Norris B. Clark noted that with these works, the poet'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." As Brooks explained in Black Women Writers at Work, "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 that 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." 

Revolution, black power, and black nationalism continued to dominate Brooks's verse during the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, however, the energy and optimism that had characterized Riot and Family Pictures were replaced with disenchantment as a result of the discord that had developed between the civil rights and black power movements. In Beckonings (1975) and To Disembark (1981), a more radical Brooks urged blacks to break free from the repression of white American society and advocated violence and anarchy as acceptable means of doing so. 

Critics have occasionally debated the literary quality of Brooks's post-1967 poetry. Some have faulted her for sacrificing formal complexity and subtlety for political polemic. Others, however, have noted that she displays the same technical skill as always and the same compassion and understanding that marked her earlier works. And nearly all agree that no matter what the content or form of her poems, Brooks has always remained devoted to what Lerone Bennett described in Say That the River Turns as "the sounds, sights and flavors of the Black community." As D. H. Melhem observed in the book Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, she "enriches both black and white cultures by revealing essential life, its universal identities, and the challenge it poses to a society beset with corruption and decay." 

In addition to her own writing, Brooks has actively encouraged other poets through teaching, lecturing, sponsoring poetry competitions, giving poetry readings, and visiting schools, prisons, and other institutions. As poet laureate of Illinois since 1968, she established and continues to support the Poet Laureate Awards competition for young writers in her state in an effort to promote poetry among schoolchildren. In recognition of her many accomplishments, Brooks has received over seventy honorary degrees, a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Foundation Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 198586, and in 1994, the National Endowment for the Humanities named her its Jefferson Lecturer, the government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. 

Brooks rejects the notion of retirement, declaring that she sees no reason to stop doing what she loves. "I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy," she remarked in Ebony. Besides, she went on to point out, "I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, `Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about.' With all that's going on, how could I stop?" 
 

Brooks died after a short illness on December 3, 2000.