Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century American poets. The author of more than 20 books, she was highly regarded even during her lifetime and had the distinction of being the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was also the first Black woman to hold the role of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now referred to as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, and served as the Illinois poet laureate for 32 years. Her body of work gave her, according to critic George E. Kent, “a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young Black militant writers of the 1960s.”

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and a classically trained pianist; both supported their daughter’s passion for reading and writing. Brooks was 13 when she published her first poem, “Eventide,” in American Childhood; by the time she was 17, she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender. After attending junior college and working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she developed her craft in poetry workshops and completed her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945).

The poems in A Street in Bronzeville and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Annie Allen (Harper & Brothers, 1949) are “devoted to small, carefully cerebrated, terse portraits of the Black urban poor,”commented Richard K. Barksdale in Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1973). Several critics welcomed Brooks as a new voice in poetry. Fellow poet Rolfe Humphries wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “we have, in A Street in Bronzeville, a good book and a real poet,” and Langston Hughes, in a review of Annie Allen for Voices, remarked that “the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks’ book are alive, reaching, and very much of today.”

In the 1950s, Brooks published her only novel, Maud Martha (Harper & Brothers, 1953), which details its title character’s life in short vignettes. Maud suffers prejudice not only from white people but also from lighter-skinned African Americans, something that mirrored Brooks’s experience. 

Her later work took on politics more overtly, displaying what National Observer contributor Bruce Cook termed “an intense awareness of the problems of color and justice.” Toni Cade Bambara reported in the New York Times Book Review that at the age of 50 

something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca [Harper & Row, 1968] and subsequent works—a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped, lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind.

This shift or change is often attributed to Brooks’s attendance at a gathering of Black writers at Fisk University in 1967; however, more recently, scholars such as Evie Shockley and Cheryl Clarke challenge the idea that Brooks’s career can be so neatly divided. Clarke, for example, described In the Mecca as Brooks’s “final seminar on the Western lyric.” Brooks herself noted this shift as quoted in The New York Times: “Those young black writers seemed so proud and committed to their own people. The poets among them felt that black poets should write as blacks, about blacks, and address themselves to blacks.” 

She later wrote, “If it hadn't been for these young people, these young writers who influenced me, I wouldn't know what I know about this society. By associating with them I know who I am.” From that time forward, Brooks thought of herself as an African determined not to compromise social comment for the sake of technical proficiency.

Essayist Charles Israel suggested that In the Mecca’s title poem, for example, shows “a deepening of Brooks’s concern with social problems.” A mother loses her small daughter in the block-long ghetto tenement, the Mecca; this long poem traces her steps through the building, revealing her neighbors to be indifferent or insulated by their own personal obsessions. The mother finds her little girl, who “never learned that black is not beloved.” Critic R. Baxter Miller, writing in Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960 (University of Tennessee Press, 1986), observed, “In the Mecca is a most complex and intriguing book; it seeks to balance the sordid realities of urban life with an imaginative process of reconciliation and redemption.” Other poems in the book, such as those occasioned by the death of Malcolm X and the dedication of a mural of Black heroes painted on a Chicago building, express Brooks’s commitment to her community’s awareness of itself as a political as well as a cultural entity.

Brooks’s activism led her to leave major publisher Harper & Row in favor of fledgling Black publishing companies. In the 1970s, she worked with Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press to publish her poetry collections Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), Aurora (1972), and Beckonings (1975) and the first volume of her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972). She also edited two collections of poetry—A Broadside Treasury (1971) and Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971)—for the Detroit-area press. The Chicago-based Third World Press, run by Haki R. Madhubuti, a young poet Brooks met during the 1960s, also brought many Brooks titles into print. Brooks was the first writer to read in the Broadside Press original Poet’s Theatre series and the first poet to read in the second opening of the series when the press was revived under new ownership in 1988. Brooks, however, felt that Riot, Family Pictures, Beckonings, and other books Black publishers brought out received only brief notice from critics of the literary establishment because they “did not wish to encourage Black publishers.”

Among Brooks’s major prose works are her two volumes of autobiography. When Report from Part One was published, some reviewers expressed disappointment that it did not provide the level of personal detail or the insight into Black literature they had expected. “They wanted a list of domestic spats,” remarked Brooks. Bambara noted that it “is not a sustained dramatic narrative for the nosey, being neither the confessions of a private woman/poet or the usual sort of mahogany-desk memoir public personages inflict upon the populace at the first sign of a cardiac. … It documents the growth of Gwen Brooks.” Other critics praised the book for explaining the poet’s new orientation toward her racial heritage and her role as a poet. In a passage she presented again in later books as a definitive statement, Brooks wrote

I—who have ‘gone the gamut’ from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress. I have hopes for myself… I know now that I am essentially an essential African, in occupancy here because of an indeed ‘peculiar’ institution… I know that Black fellow-feeling must be the Black man’s encyclopedic Primer. I know that the Black-and-white integration concept, which in the mind of some beaming early saint was a dainty spinning dream, has wound down to farce… I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black… In the Conference-That-Counts, whose date may be 1980 or 2080 (woe betide the Fabric of Man if it is 2080), there will be no looking up nor looking down.

Brooks put some of the finishing touches on the second volume of her autobiography at the age of 68 while serving as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Of her many duties there, the most important, in her view, were visits to local schools. Similar visits to colleges, universities, prisons, hospitals, and drug rehabilitation centers characterized her tenure as poet laureate of Illinois. In that role, she sponsored and hosted annual literary awards ceremonies at which she presented prizes funded, as related by Reginald Gibbons in the Chicago Tribune, “out of [Brooks’s] own pocket, which, despite her modest means, is of legendary depth.”

Because of the wide recognition of her service and achievements, several schools were named for her, and she was similarly honored in 1970 by the founding of Western Illinois University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center. In 2017, the centenary of Brooks’s birth was celebrated at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her papers are held. “Brooks Day” is celebrated annually in her hometown of Chicago.