GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas on June 7, 1917, the granddaughter of a runaway slave, and grew up in the slums of Chicago. Her parents were David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, formerly an elementary schoolteacher. From the time she was one month old, Ms. Brooks lived with her family, which later came to include a brother, Raymond, in the sprawling black ghetto on the South Side of Chicago.

Her economically deprived but respectable upbringing was enriched by her parents’ love of education and culture. Keziah brooks composed songs and “storyettes” to amuse her children; David Brooks read them daily selections from his prized set of Harvard Classics. Encouraged by her parents, Ms. Brooks read widely and was especially fond of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Canadian novelist who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the black poet.

When she was thirteen, one of her poems “Eventide,” was published in American Childhood, a popular children’s magazine of the period. Urged by her mother, she sent samples of her work to James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes and received encouraging comments from both men. After graduating from Englewood High school in 1934, she completed her formal education at Wilson Junior College, now known as Kennedy-King College, in 1936, majoring in English literature. Gwendolyn Brooks had been a regular contributor to “Lights and Shadows,” a column of miscellany in the Chicago Defender, the city’s black daily newspaper. When she obtained her college degree, she hoped for work as a Defender reporter.

In the mid-1940s such established literary magazines as Harper’s, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Yale Review, and Poetry, began to publish Ms. Brooks’ poems. Encouraged, she submitted nineteen poems to Harper & Brothers, which agreed to publish them on the recommendation of Richard Wright, the black novelist. In his appraisal Wright said: “[Ms. Brooks] easily catches the pathos of petty destinies, the whimper of the wounded, the tiny incidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of common prejudice. . . . There is not so much an exhibiting of Negro life to whites in these poems as there is an honest human reaction to the pain that lurks so carefully in the Black Belt.”

Gwendolyn Brooks was an "objective" poet, one who has discovered the neglected miracles of everyday life. A lifelong resident of Chicago Brooks wrote unflinchingly about the lives of its impoverished blacks, particularly its women, in wrenching portraits that are social documents as well as works of art. Despite the narrow focus of her work, her poems have a universal appeal.

In 1946 and 1947 Brooks received a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing and in 1946 a $1,000 grant in literature from the National Institute of Arts and letters. Mademoiselle magazine named her one of its Ten Women of 1945.

To Blyden Jackson, who analyzed her work years later in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation (1974), Annie Allen was representative of Ms. Brooks’ method: the study “of the flower in the crannied wall.” “Her genius operates within its area of greatest strength,” he wrote, “the close inspection of a limited domain, to reap from that inspection . . . a view of life in which one may see a microscopic portion of the universe intensely and yet, through that microscopic portion, see all truth for the human condition wherever it exists.” Annie Allen won for Brooks the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine in 1949 and the Pulitzer for poetry in 1950. It was the first time the award was conferred on a black woman.

On Sunday, December 3, 2000, world-renowned writer, and humanitarian Gwendolyn Brooks passed away at her Chicago, Illinois residence; she was 83. Brooks is survived by her son, Henry Blakely III, her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, and countless family members, friends, and fellow poets. Her husband, Henry Blakely, II, preceded her in death.

The legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks consists of her immeasurable contribution to literature as well as the cultural and social contributions made by those she influenced in myriad ways.