Harris Feinsod on The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks

"Gladly, we now have [Angela] Jackson’s slender biography of her friend and mentor: A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks," writes Harris Feinsod in a new review of the 2017 book at Chicago Review. More:

...A broad-mindedly appealing and well-researched account, it interprets the achievements of Brooks’s poetry for new readers, and contextualizes them in the city’s history. Though some episodes hew closely to George E. Kent’s 1990 biography, it is among the strongest reassertions, since Brooks’s 2000 death, of her importance to civic life, cultural politics, and literary expression in the city she called her “headquarters” and in the lines that she traced beyond it.

Brooks was born in July 1917, two months after the US entered World War I and two years before the Red Summer of 1919. Her family supported her literary talents—her mother Keziah dubbed her “the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar”—even when they became Depression-era “bean eaters” or when Brooks came to know both racism and “the sting of colorism” at school and work. In the 1930s, the Black-owned newspaper the Chicago Defenderpublished seventy-five poems from her juvenilia, but in 1937, publisher Robert Abbott rejected her application as a journalist, showing a bias against dark-skinned “Negroes.” Resiliently, the young Brooks briefly published her own mimeograph newspaper and years later invented a new genre of “verse journalism.”

Despite such sources of alienation, Jackson argues that Brooks’s writing emerged from a progressive matrix of Chicago community activism and African American institution building...

Continue at Chicago Review.