A landmark poet, novelist, and autobiographer, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is treasured for an abiding humanity strongly grounded on the experiences of wife and mother. A symbol of commitment to her race, she became the first black American to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of the Arts and Letters Grant in literature, and the Pulitzer Prize. She is immersed in the rhythms, themes, and language of the black American. She committed her art to the commonalities and hardships of living in a racist society.
Brooks is a native of Topeka, Kansas, born on June 7, 1917, the eldest of three children. Rooted in Chicago’s South Side, she kept detailed notebooks from age six, because she was determined to become a spokesperson for black people.
Brooks’ education at Hyde Park Branch, Wendell Phillips High, and Englewood High was uninspiring, primarily because it presented Brooks no black role models among teachers and staff and few nonwhite peers. Withdrawn, she read from the foremost white authors of the day—T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, and Wallace Stevens—and began learning the intricacies of sonnet, alliteration, and wit. At age 13, certain she would one day be a member of America’s best, she buried a sheaf of verse in the backyard for later discovery. Three years later, her mother escorted her to readings of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Johnson had little to say, but Hughes eagerly nudged Brooks toward a career in poetry.
Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College, then married poet Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., writer for Wilson Press and father of their children, Henry and Nora. While on the faculty of Chicago Teacher’s College, she graduated to professional poet with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), a landmark series of portraits highlighting the verve of city-dwellers. That same year, she won the Midwestern Writers’ Conference Poetry award for the third year as well as recognition as one of Mademoiselle’s ten outstanding women of 1945, which afforded her introductions to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
After her publisher rejected a novel proposal, Brooks shifted to woman-centered verse. She highlighted the ambiguities of women’s lives with a mock epic, “The Anniad,” in Annie Allen (1949), winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She experimented with a semiautobiographical novel, Maud Martha (1953), a repressed self-study that sidesteps family frustrations, and issued a children’s compendium, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), a continuation of Chicago-based observations.
The burgeoning civil rights movement influenced Brooks’ independent period. No longer courting white readers, she produced The Bean Eaters (1960), a collection of idiosyncratic verse that editors often pilfer for representative black verse to flesh out multicultural texts. Buoyed by critical response to Selected Poems (1963), she wowed critics with a dark, groundbreaking ballad series, In the Mecca (1968), based on her secretarial work for an evangelist. The text is a sophisticated satire of city opulence from the vantage point of a domestic worker, Mrs. Sallie, who searches a city center for Pepita, her lost child. The narrative concludes with praise for black heroes Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
Brooks’ verse sharpened in Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), Broadside Treasury (1971), and Jump Bad (1971). This flood of new writings anticipated the height of her skills displayed in an urgent, fiercely militant collection, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), the last manuscript she entrusted to a white publisher. She contracted with black presses and published an impressionistic autobiography, Report from Part One: The Autobiography of Gwendolyn Brooks (1972), which showcases memories and photos of her younger brother Raymond.
Richer, fuller statements of black loyalties infuse Brooks’ The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves (1974), Beckonings (1975), Primer for Blacks (1980), To Disembark (1981), The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986), Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988), and Winnie (1988). With the anthology Blacks (1987), Brooks began publishing through her own press. Her many achievements include election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, in 1973, appointment to the poetry consultancy of the Library of Congress. A distinguished professor of English at Chicago State University, Brooks was the impetus for the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, a continuation of her support for the next generation of artists.
Brooks died on December 3, 2000.
