Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, and died on December 3, 2000. She was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her writing often focused on the everyday joys and challenges of people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for her book Annie Allen, becoming the first African American to receive this award.
During her long and successful writing career, Brooks earned many other honors. She lived in Chicago her entire life and was chosen as Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. She held this position until her death in 2000. In 1985, she was named U.S. Poet Laureate for the 1985–86 term. In 1976, she became the first African-American woman added to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Early life
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, and grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. She was the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah (Wims) Brooks. Her father worked as a janitor for a music company. He had wanted to become a doctor but gave up that dream to support his family. Her mother was a school teacher and a concert pianist trained in classical music. Brooks’ mother taught at the Topeka school that later became part of the Brown v. Board of Education case, which ended racial segregation in public schools. Family stories said her grandfather had escaped slavery to join the Union army during the American Civil War.
When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, a time when many African Americans relocated from the South to the North. From then on, Chicago was her home. She remained connected to the city for the rest of her life. In a 1994 interview, she said:
"Living in the city, I wrote differently than I would have if I had been raised in Topeka, KS… I am a true Chicago resident. Living there has given me many different people to learn from. I hope to live there the rest of my days. That's my headquarters."
Brooks began her education at Forestville Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. She later attended Hyde Park High School, a prestigious integrated school with mostly white students, before transferring to Wendell Phillips High School, an all-black school. She finished her schooling at Englewood High School, which was integrated.
According to biographer Kenny Jackson Williams, Brooks faced racial injustice during her time at these schools because of the social conditions and the time period. These experiences helped her understand prejudice and bias in systems and institutions across America.
Brooks started writing at a young age. Her mother encouraged her, saying, "You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar," a famous African American poet. During her teenage years, she filled books with "careful rhymes" and "lofty meditations" and sent poems to publications. Her first poem was published in American Childhood when she was 13. By the time she graduated from high school in 1935, she was regularly writing for The Chicago Defender, a newspaper.
After high school, Brooks did not attend a four-year college because she wanted to be a writer and believed it was not necessary. "I am not a scholar," she later said. "I'm just a writer who loves to write and will always write." She graduated in 1936 from a two-year program at Wilson Junior College, now called Kennedy-King College. At first, she worked as a typist to support herself while she pursued her writing career.
Career
Gwendolyn Brooks published her first poem, "Eventide," in a children's magazine called American Childhood when she was 13 years old. By the time she was 16, she had written and published about 75 poems. At 17, she began sending her work to "Lights and Shadows," a poetry section in the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Her poems, many written while she was in college, included traditional styles like ballads and sonnets, as well as poems that used blues rhythms in free verse. In her early years, she received praise and support from writers like James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. James Weldon Johnson gave her the first critique of her poems when she was 16 years old.
Her poems often focused on life in the inner city, a place she knew well. She once said, "I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material."
By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. One important workshop was led by Inez Cunningham Stark, a wealthy white woman with a strong background in literature. Stark held writing workshops at the South Side Community Art Center, which Brooks attended. It was there that Brooks began to develop her voice and learn more about poetic techniques. Langston Hughes visited the workshop and heard her read "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee." In 1944, Brooks achieved a goal she had worked toward since she was 14: two of her poems were published in Poetry magazine's November issue. In an interview with the magazine, she described her job at the time as a "housewife."
Brooks published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), with Harper & Brothers after Richard Wright, a well-known author, supported the publisher. The book includes poems about the lives of African Americans in the Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville. Wright told editors who asked for his opinion about Brooks' work: "There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. … She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes."
The book received immediate praise for its honest and detailed descriptions of life in Bronzeville. Brooks later said that a glowing review by Paul Engle in the Chicago Tribune helped start her reputation. Engle said Brooks' poems were no more "Negro poetry" than Robert Frost's work was "white poetry." In 1946, Brooks received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was listed as one of the "Ten Young Women of the Year" in Mademoiselle magazine.
Brooks' second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), focused on the life of a young Black girl growing up in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The book won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and also received Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize.
In 1953, Brooks published her first and only narrative book, a novella called Maud Martha, which is a series of 34 short stories about Black women entering adulthood. The book follows the life of a Black woman named Maud Martha Brown as she moves from childhood to adulthood. It tells the story of "a woman with doubts about herself and where and how she fits into the world. Maud's concern is not so much that she is inferior but that she is perceived as being ugly," wrote author Harry B. Shaw in his book Gwendolyn Brooks. Maud faces prejudice and discrimination from both white people and Black people with lighter skin, a reference to Brooks' own experiences. Eventually, Maud stands up for herself by turning her back on a patronizing and racist store clerk. "The book is … about the triumph of the lowly," Shaw said. In contrast, literary scholar Mary Helen Washington pointed out Brooks' critique of racism and sexism, calling Maud Martha "a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred, and the silence that results from suppressed anger."
In 1967, the year Langston Hughes died, Brooks attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in Nashville. There, she met activists and artists like Amiri Baraka and Don L. Lee, who introduced her to new ideas about Black cultural nationalism. Some recent studies suggest that Brooks had been involved in leftist politics in Chicago for many years and, because of pressure from McCarthyism, adopted a Black nationalist stance to distance herself from her earlier political connections. Her experience at the conference inspired much of her later work. She taught creative writing to members of the Blackstone Rangers, a violent gang in Chicago. In 1968, she published one of her most famous works, In the Mecca, a long poem about a mother's search for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building. The poem was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.
After publishing with Harper, Brooks began working with independent Black-owned publishers in the 1960s, including Broadside Press, Third World Press, and her own small presses, Brooks Press and The David Company.
Her autobiographical book Report From Part One, which includes memories, interviews, photographs, and short stories, was published in 1972. Report From Part Two came out in 1995, when Brooks was nearly 80. Her other works include Primer for Blacks (1980), Young Poet’s Primer (1980), To Disembark (1981), The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems (1986), Blacks (1987), Winnie (1988), and Children Coming Home (1991). She contributed to the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Brooks' first teaching experience was at the University of Chicago, where she was invited by author Frank London Brown to teach a course in American literature. This began her lifelong work in teaching poetry and writing. She taught in many places, including Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, and the City College of New York. Her final student was poet Quraysh Ali Lansana, who said Brooks mentored him for many years.
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois has Brooks' archives, which her daughter Nora Blakely donated. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley also holds a collection of her personal papers, especially from 1950 to 1989.
Family life
In 1939, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely Jr., after she joined Chicago's NAACP Youth Council. They had two children: Henry Lowington Blakely III and Nora Brooks Blakely. Brooks' husband passed away in 1996.
From mid-1961 to late 1964, Henry III served in the U.S. Marine Corps. He first worked at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and later at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay. During this time, Brooks helped her son's fiancée, Kathleen Hardiman, learn how to write poetry. After Henry III returned, Blakely and Hardiman married in 1965. Brooks enjoyed helping Kathleen and later began mentoring more young Black poets.
Gwendolyn Brooks died at her home in Chicago on December 3, 2000, at the age of 83. She is buried in Lincoln Cemetery.
Works
The Poetry Foundation includes these works along with others. Several books that contain many poems by Brooks were published.