Introduction
(1917–2000). Her songs of life on Chicago’s South Side warmly told it the way it was in her neighborhood’s Black community. She was Gwendolyn Brooks, poet laureate of Illinois and the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize. Her poems tell what she saw and heard and describe the racism and poverty that Black people have faced. She wrote especially about the everyday lives and struggles of Black city dwellers.
Early Life and Family
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. Her parents were David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims Brooks. Her mother had come home to Topeka from Chicago to give birth to her child. When Brooks was one month old, the family returned to Chicago. She was one of two children. Her brother, Raymond Brooks, became an artist.
Encouraged by her parents, Gwendolyn Brooks began to write poetry at about age seven. When she was in her early teens, her poem Eventide appeared in a well-known magazine of the time, American Childhood. She continued to write poetry while attending school. More than 75 of her poems were printed in the Chicago Defender, a local newspaper.
Upon graduating from Englewood High School in 1934, Brooks entered Wilson Junior College, where she majored in literature. She graduated in 1938. Brooks then worked as a typist until shortly after her marriage, in 1938, to Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., a writer and businessman. They had two children, a son, Henry Lowington Blakely III, and a daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely.
Poetry Career
Brooks’s first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945. Annie Allen (1949) earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950. The book is a loosely connected series of poems about a Black girl’s growing up in Chicago. Bronzeville Boys and Girls, a book of children’s poems, was published in 1956.
Brooks’s most highly praised collection, The Bean Eaters, was published in 1960. It contains some of her most famous poems, including “We Real Cool.”Written in a simple style, the poem depicts the difficulties of poverty on young people.
Brooks’s other books of verse include Selected Poems (1963), In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Blacks (1987; revised edition, 1991), and Children Coming Home (1991). She also wrote an autobiographical novel, Maud Martha (1953). Her Report from Part One (1972) and Report from Part Two (1996) is a two-part collection of personal memoirs, interviews, and letters.
Brooks lectured and taught poetry at various colleges. She was a professor of English at Chicago State University from 1990 to 2000. She received numerous awards and honors for her poetry, including being named the Jefferson Lecturer of the National Endowment of the Humanities in 1994. In 1968 she succeeded the late Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death on December 3, 2000, in Chicago.
