Brooks, Gwendolyn

Source:

 African American National Biography

Brooks, Gwendolyn

(7 June 1917–3 Dec. 2000),

poet and novelist, was born Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks at her grandmother's home in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and Keziah Wims Brooks. When she was two months old, the family settled in Chicago, where she would live the rest of her life. Brooks and her brother had a sheltered upbringing in a cheerful, orderly household. (She would later draw on memories of those years for her poem “a song in the front yard” [1945].) At Forrestville Elementary School, where she learned that light skin and fine hair were valued, this shy child with dark skin and coarse hair felt socially isolated. Her mother, however, encouraged her interest in writing, and Brooks published her first poem in American Childhood magazine in 1930.

Later, to escape further isolation at a mostly white high school, she transferred to an all-black school; finally, at the somewhat more integrated Englewood High School, she found a peer group and teachers who encouraged her writing. From then on, she was constantly publishing—in national periodicals and regularly in Chicago's African American newspaper, the Defender. With her mother's encouragement, she showed her work to the poets James Weldon Johnson, whom she found cold and distant, and Langston Hughes, with whom she established a long friendship.

Her family struggled financially during the Great Depression, but the year she finished high school Wilson Junior College opened with a low tuition that made it possible for her to earn an associate's degree. After college Brooks endured a series of dead-end jobs, including a humiliating position as a domestic; she later fictionalized that experience in her poem “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat” and in a chapter of her novel Maud Martha. She also worked several months for a charlatan spiritual healer operating out of the Mecca Building, a once fashionable apartment building that had decayed into a tenement; her experiences therein would later become the basis of her long narrative poem “In the Mecca.” Active in the Youth Council of the NAACP, she cofounded a club for young black artists and writers. Through the NAACP, she met fellow poet Henry Blakely, whom she married in 1939; they had two children. Blakely died in 1996.

Gwendolyn Brooks, sitting in the Poet Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., March 1986. (AP Images.)

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Brooks's mature style developed after 1941, when she and her husband joined a South Side poetry workshop run by the white socialite Inez Cunningham Stark. Brooks credited Stark with introducing her to the artistic possibilities available in poetic form and forcing her to submit her work to more rigorous aesthetic judgment. She began winning poetry contests, and book publishers encouraged her to develop more poems about African American life. The title of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), refers to the Defender's name for the African American section of Chicago. The book includes some of her most admired poems, such as “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” a portrait of a Bronzeville dandy; “The Mother,” a bold and compassionate poem about abortion; and two poems that present African American perspectives on World War II, “Negro Hero” and “Gay Chaps at the Bar.”

Working on poetry, fiction, and book reviews while her son attended school, Brooks wrote Annie Allen (1949), which loosely follows the life of the title character, an intelligent, sensitive African American woman. The centerpiece is the poem “The Anniad”; the title alludes to Virgil's ancient epic the Aeneid, and the language strives for Virgilian complexity, suggesting the extraordinary heroism and ingenuity it takes to get through an ordinary life. For that book she became the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

Ironically, as Brooks was receiving high literary honors, her family was having trouble finding suitable housing. The tiny apartments they lived in are described in many of her poems. Housing for African Americans in Chicago was then limited to one area on the South Side; it had expanded very little over the decades, while its population had increased, nearly doubling in the 1940s. Part of her motivation for writing a novel, therefore, was to earn enough of an advance to be able to put a down payment on a house. The resulting autobiographical novel, Maud Martha (1953), is now considered a classic of African American literature, with its intimate, affectionate, and sometimes infuriated view of urban African American life in mid-century, before the rise of the civil rights movement. It portrays, through a series of lyrical scenes and frequent linguistic play, the childhood and young adulthood of an African American woman in Chicago.

Brooks's next collection, The Bean Eaters (1960), took an explicitly political turn with such poems as “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” about the tragic result of a black family's move into a white neighborhood. Her most popular and most often reprinted poem, “We Real Cool,” in eight short, infectiously rhythmic lines, introduces seven dropouts bragging about their wild lives despite their expectation of early death. She came to consider this poem her most successful combination of artistry with popular appeal, since, with its clarity and catchiness as well as its frequent inclusion in anthologies, it has spoken to an unusually broad audience.

In 1963 Brooks was offered a teaching position at Chicago's Columbia College. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she would go on to teach also at Elmhurst College, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among other schools. Brooks identified 1967 as the turning point in her career. Attending a Black Writers Conference at Fisk University, she was impressed by the contrast between the formal respect for her and the enthusiasm for the more radical Amiri Baraka. That striking contrast indicated to her a shift in African American culture from liberal integrationism toward a more militant black nationalism. Returning home, she was asked by the writer and community organizer Walter Bradford to lead a workshop for some members of the Blackstone Rangers street gang who were interested in writing. Although she eventually turned that workshop over to Bradford, she started meeting with black college students (including Don L. Lee [later Haki R. Madhubuti] and Carolyn Rodgers) for workshops in her home. Both these groups resisted Brooks's attempts to teach traditional poetic forms and high cultural aesthetics, insisting rather on a populist aesthetic in tune with their radical politics.

Also in 1967 Brooks read at the dedication of a mural depicting African American cultural heroes, including herself. Afterward, some of her workshop students led her into a local bar, where they gave an impromptu poetry reading, much to the appreciation of the patrons. The literary ambitions of the gang members and the warm reception of the tavern customers opened Brooks's eyes to an audience she had neglected. The events of that year initiated her commitment to the Black Power movement and black cultural nationalism, as well as to the Black Arts Movement, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged black artists and writers to reject European- derived aesthetics and the production of works for white audiences in favor of African and African American themes and forms for a specifically African American audience.

In 1968 she succeeded Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois, and, using her own funds, she established an award for young writers in the state. That same year Harper and Row, Brooks's publisher since 1945, brought out the collection In the Mecca, which includes her narrative poem set in the Mecca Building, as a tribute to martyred heroes such as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, and a sequence of poems about the Blackstone Rangers. Starting with Riot (1969), she published new work only with black presses. Dudley Randall's small but influential Broadside Press in Detroit began publishing chapbooks of her new poetry, two anthologies she edited, and her unconventional autobiography Report from Part One (1972). Rather than providing a straightforward narrative of her life, the latter volume offers a collage of anecdotes, comments on her own and others' writing, interviews, photographs, and commentary on her work by other writers. She would publish other chapbooks and the collection To Disembark (1981) through Madhubuti's Third World Press and her own imprints.

In 1969 she and her husband separated, and she felt a renewed sense of freedom. She traveled on her own to East Africa, an experience that influenced her sense of American blacks as Africans in the New World. It was during this period that she wrote the first volume of her autobiography and began editing an annual periodical, The Black Position (1971–1974). Her mother, however, encouraged Brooks and her husband to reconcile, which they did in 1973; in part to celebrate that reunion, they traveled together to Ghana.

In 1976 Brooks became the first black woman elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1985. By this point, however, much of her early work, except for Selected Poems (1963), was out of print, so she self-published her collected works, Blacks (1987). Over the years, she received numerous awards, including over fifty honorary doctorates. She died in Chicago.

With passion, clarity, and rich literary craft, Brooks's writings present and comment on urban African American life in the mid- to late twentieth century. As the struggle for racial justice heated up, she became a more overtly political public figure. She was the most prestigious African American poet of her generation, so her conversion in the late 1960s to a radical black politics was an important endorsement of that position. Her decision to publish only with black presses restricted the audience for her later work, but it made concrete her commitment to African American readers and cultural institutions. She successfully married political engagement with the highest quality of artistry and in the latter part of her career sought to present poetry as a cultural practice available to everyone, not just the literary elite. A major figure in American poetry, she used her personal prestige to support and inspire young black writers and to establish publishing institutions that would serve the specific cultural interests of African Americans.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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