Gwendolyn Brooks: 1917-2000
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Alice Walker said of Brooks: “‘If ever there was a poet born, I think it is Brooks’” (qtd. in Baym 2697)
Rita Dove remembers reading Brooks’s poems that “‘weren’t afraid to take language and swamp it,
twist it and engage it so that it shimmered and dashed and lingered’” (qtd. in Baym 2698)
Born in Topeka, Kansas, but grew up in Chicago
o Had a relatively happy childhood; once said, “‘I had always felt that to be black was good’”
(qtd. in Melham 2312)
First began writing at age 7; her mother predicted, “‘You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence
Dunbar’” (qtd. in Melham 2312)
o First published at age 11
o By 16, she was contributing to The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, on a
weekly basis
Eventually meets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, who are friends and mentors
1938: Marries Henry Blakeley; later has two children
1945: A Street in Bronzeville
1950: Wins the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Annie Allen (1949), the first African-American to do so
o Also the first African-American woman to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and
Letters and to be selected as Consultant to the Library of Congress
Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance writers, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, and the Black Arts Movement of
the 1960s
Career “linked two very different generations of African-American poets” (Baym 2697)
o 1967 on: Increasingly interested in the Black Nationalist perspective
o Writes exclusively for a black audience
o “In her style, too, her work evolved out of the concentrated imagery and narratives of her earlier
writing, with its often formal diction, and moved toward an increased use of the energetic,
improvisatory rhythms of jazz, the combinations of African chants, and an emphatically spoken
language. The result is a poetry constantly revising itself and the world, open to change but
evocative of history” (Baym 2697-8)
1968: In the Mecca: shows her becoming more open to free verse
Traveled widely and constantly, holding workshops, giving readings and lectures, and speaking in
schools, libraries, prisons (Melham 2313)
1971, 1974: Visits to Africa deepen her sense of African heritage
“Yet her poetry marks the rich confluence and continuity of a dual stream: the black sermonic tradition
and black music—the spiritual, the blues, and jazz; and white antecedents like the ballad, the sonnet,
and conventional and free forms” (Melham 2313)
“Brooks’s heroic and prophetic voice surfaces in what she called ‘preachments.’ Brooks intended that
her work ‘call all black people’” (Melham 2313)
“Brooks presented a poetry of caritas; of potential and actual black strength, community, and pride. Her
memorable portraits of men, women, and children pose a general as well as a specific validity. She is a
major voice in modern American poetry, a heroic voice insisting on our mutual democratic heritage”
(Melham 2313)
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, Editor. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2003.
Melham, D.H. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Concise Edition. Ed Paul Lauter.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 2312-2313.