Gwendolyn Brooks made the kitchenette apartments and street corners of Chicago’s South Side a subject for poetry of formal mastery. In 1950 she became the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, and after 1967 she remade her career around the Black Arts Movement, publishing with Black presses and mentoring young poets for the rest of her life.
At a Glance
- Born
- 7 June 1917, Topeka, Kansas
- Died
- 3 December 2000, Chicago, Illinois
- Birth name
- Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
- Known for
- A Street in Bronzeville (1945); Annie Allen (1949; Pulitzer Prize, 1950); “We Real Cool” in The Bean Eaters (1960); In the Mecca (1968)
- Fields
- Literature
- Era
- Letters, Arts & Sciences
Early Life
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on 7 June 1917, to David Anderson Brooks, a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor, and Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks, a former schoolteacher. The family moved to Chicago when she was an infant, and she grew up on the South Side, the district that would become the setting of nearly all her work.
Her parents encouraged her writing from childhood. She published her first poem in the magazine American Childhood as a young teenager, and at sixteen she became a regular contributor to “Lights and Shadows,” the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, which published some one hundred of her poems. As a teenager she sent work to James Weldon Johnson and met Langston Hughes, both of whom encouraged her. She graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936.
Brooks married the writer Henry Blakely, and the couple lived for years in a series of small South Side apartments; their son, Henry Jr., was born in 1940 and their daughter, Nora, in 1951. In the early 1940s she joined a poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center led by Inez Cunningham Stark, where she studied modernist poetry and sharpened her command of traditional forms.
Life and Work
Harper & Brothers published her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. Its portraits of the residents of Black Chicago — women in kitchenettes, returning soldiers, the hustlers and churchgoers of the neighborhood — brought wide critical notice, and Guggenheim Fellowships followed. Alongside “kitchenette building” the book included “the mother,” a dramatic monologue about abortion, and “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” a sonnet sequence on Black soldiers in the Second World War, written largely in the voices of Black servicemen in a segregated military. Her second collection, Annie Allen (1949), traced a young Black woman’s life from girlhood to maturity through ballads, sonnets, and an ambitious mock epic, “The Anniad.” It won Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize and, in May 1950, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the first Pulitzer awarded to a Black author.
In the 1950s she published her only novel, Maud Martha (1953), a spare account of a Black woman’s coming of age in Chicago, and a book of children’s poems, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). The Bean Eaters (1960) included “We Real Cool,” one of the most anthologized poems in American literature, as well as poems responding to the lynching of Emmett Till and the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival, and her Selected Poems appeared in 1963.
The second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1967 marked a turning point. Brooks, then about fifty, encountered the younger poets of the Black Arts Movement, including Amiri Baraka and Haki R. Madhubuti, and later described the experience as an awakening to a new Black consciousness. She began a workshop for young writers in her home, among them members of the Blackstone Rangers street gang, and turned her poetry toward a direct address to Black readers.
In the Mecca (1968), set in a decaying Chicago apartment building, was her last book with Harper & Row. She then moved her work to Black-owned publishers, including Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in Detroit, which issued Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), and her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972), and later Madhubuti’s Third World Press in Chicago. In 1987 she issued the omnibus collection Blacks under her own imprint, the David Company, named for her father. In 1968 she succeeded Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois, a post she held until her death, and she used it to sponsor poetry prizes for schoolchildren across the state.
Legacy
Brooks received many of the highest honors in American letters. In 1976 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; from 1985 to 1986 she served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the first Black woman in that post; in 1994 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her to deliver its Jefferson Lecture; and in 1995 she received the National Medal of Arts. She taught at Chicago State University, which established the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing in her name.
She died at her home in Chicago on 3 December 2000, at eighty-three, after nearly seven decades of publishing poetry. Critics have described her career as a bridge between the formal tradition of modernist poetry and the Black Arts Movement’s insistence on writing for and from the Black community, and her attention to ordinary lives in a specific neighborhood remains a model for poets who followed. Chicago’s Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy is named for her, and Chicago institutions marked the centennial of her birth in 2017 with readings, exhibitions, and publications.
Gwendolyn Brooks made ordinary Black lives on Chicago’s South Side the subject of great poetry, and later chose to write for and publish within the Black community. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 7 June 1917 Born in Topeka, Kansas; the family soon moves to Chicago.
- 1934 A regular contributor to the Chicago Defender’s poetry column.
- 1936 Graduates from Wilson Junior College.
- 1945 Publishes A Street in Bronzeville.
- 1950 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen, the first Black writer so honored.
- 1960 Publishes The Bean Eaters, including “We Real Cool.”
- 1967 Attends the second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University.
- 1968 Publishes In the Mecca; named poet laureate of Illinois.
- 1985 Appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
- 3 December 2000 Dies at home in Chicago.
Sources and Further Reading
- George E. Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).
- Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972).
- Academy of American Poets, “About Gwendolyn Brooks.” Link
- Office of the Illinois Poet Laureate, “Gwendolyn Brooks.” Link
- Poetry Foundation, “Gwendolyn Brooks.” Link
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