Gwendolyn Brooks

Based on Wikipedia: Gwendolyn Brooks

The First

On May 1, 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was thirty-two years old. The award was for Annie Allen, a collection of poems tracing the life of a Black girl growing up in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago's South Side—the same streets where Brooks herself had come of age, where she still lived, and where she would remain for the rest of her life.

That "first" would define how many people remembered her. But Brooks was never interested in being a symbol. She was interested in the people she saw from her second-floor apartment window, the ones she could observe by looking first to one side and then the other. "There was my material," she said.

A Chicago Life

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, but she was only six weeks old when her family joined the Great Migration—that massive movement of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South for northern cities in the early twentieth century. They settled on Chicago's South Side, and Brooks would call herself "an organic Chicagoan" for the next eighty-three years.

Her parents had sacrificed much. Her father, David, worked as a janitor for a music company, though he had once dreamed of becoming a doctor. He gave up that aspiration to support a family. Her mother, Keziah, was a schoolteacher and classically trained concert pianist who had taught at the Topeka school that would later become famous as one of the institutions challenged in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that declared school segregation unconstitutional. Family stories held that Brooks's paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to fight for the Union in the Civil War.

This was the household that shaped a poet: working-class, aspirational, steeped in both hardship and hope.

Becoming a Writer

Brooks's mother saw something in her daughter early. "You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar," she told the young Gwendolyn, invoking the celebrated African American poet who had died in 1906, just eleven years before Brooks was born. Dunbar was famous for writing in both standard English and African American dialect, for capturing the rhythms of Black life in America. It was a bold prophecy, and Brooks would exceed it.

She published her first poem at thirteen. By sixteen, she had written and published approximately seventy-five poems—a staggering output for someone still in high school. At seventeen, she began submitting work to "Lights and Shadows," the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, one of the most influential African American newspapers in the country.

Her education was fragmented but formative. She attended three different high schools: first a prestigious integrated school with a predominantly white student body, then an all-Black school, and finally another integrated school. According to her biographers, navigating these different social worlds taught her about the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that prejudice operated—not just in individual interactions but in systems and institutions.

She did not pursue a four-year college degree. "I am not a scholar," she later explained. "I'm just a writer who loves to write and will always write." She graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936—the same institution now known as Kennedy-King College—and took a job as a typist to support herself while she wrote.

Finding Her Voice

The pivotal moment came in 1941, when Brooks began attending poetry workshops organized by Inez Cunningham Stark, an affluent white woman with a serious literary background. These workshops met at the newly opened South Side Community Art Center, and they gave Brooks something essential: a community of writers, rigorous feedback, and deeper knowledge of poetic craft.

One day, Langston Hughes stopped by the workshop and heard Brooks read "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee." Hughes was already a titan of American letters, one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. That he took notice mattered.

But Hughes wasn't the only established writer who recognized her talent. James Weldon Johnson—poet, diplomat, and civil rights leader—had sent Brooks the first serious critique of her poems when she was just sixteen. Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy, would later champion her first book.

In 1944, Brooks achieved a goal she had been pursuing for a decade: two of her poems appeared in Poetry magazine. In the biographical note she submitted, she listed her occupation as "housewife."

A Street in Bronzeville

Brooks's first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, was published by Harper & Brothers in 1945. Richard Wright had lobbied hard for it. When the publishers asked his opinion of Brooks's manuscript, he wrote:

There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes.

That last phrase hints at something distinctive about Brooks's work. She was not interested in presenting a sanitized or heroic version of Black life for white audiences. She wrote about colorism—prejudice within the Black community based on skin tone. She wrote about domestic violence, about poverty, about the small humiliations and fleeting joys of ordinary people. She wrote about complexity.

The book earned immediate critical acclaim. Paul Engle's glowing review in the Chicago Tribune particularly pleased Brooks. Engle argued that her poems were no more "Negro poetry" than Robert Frost's work was "white poetry"—a statement that situated her firmly in the American literary mainstream while acknowledging the specificity of her subject matter.

The following year, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mademoiselle magazine named her one of its "Ten Young Women of the Year."

Maud Martha

In 1953, Brooks published her only work of prose fiction, a novella called Maud Martha. It consists of thirty-four brief vignettes following a Black woman from childhood through adulthood. Like Annie Allen, it drew on the textures of Bronzeville life that Brooks knew intimately.

The book grapples with questions of beauty and self-worth. Maud Martha Brown—dark-skinned, quiet, observant—moves through a world that often makes her feel invisible or inadequate. She experiences prejudice not only from white people but from lighter-skinned Black people, a dynamic Brooks had observed and experienced herself.

Critics have interpreted the book differently over the decades. Some emphasize its theme of quiet triumph—Maud eventually learns to stand up for herself, including a scene where she turns her back on a patronizing racist store clerk. Others, like the literary scholar Mary Helen Washington, read it as something darker: "a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred, and the silence that results from suppressed anger."

Perhaps it is both. Perhaps that ambiguity is part of what makes it endure.

A Turning Point

The year 1967 marked a transformation in Brooks's life and work.

She attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in Nashville. There she encountered a new generation of artists and activists—people like Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) and Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti)—who were articulating a vision of Black cultural nationalism. They argued that Black artists should create work for Black audiences, published by Black institutions, expressing distinctly Black aesthetics.

Some scholars have suggested this shift was not as sudden as it might appear. They point to evidence that Brooks had been involved in leftist politics in Chicago for years and that, under the pressures of McCarthyism—the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s—she may have adopted Black nationalism partly as a way of distancing herself from earlier political associations.

Whatever the full story, the change in her publishing choices was unmistakable. After decades with Harper, she began working with independent Black-owned publishers: Broadside Press, Third World Press, and eventually her own small presses, Brooks Press and The David Company.

Teaching the Next Generation

Brooks's commitment to nurturing young writers intensified in these years. She taught creative writing to the Blackstone Rangers—a Chicago gang notorious for violence—believing that poetry belonged to everyone. She held teaching posts at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, and the City College of New York.

Her first teaching experience had come years earlier, when the novelist Frank London Brown invited her to teach American literature at the University of Chicago. But it was the mentoring of individual young poets that seemed to mean the most to her. In the early 1960s, while her son Henry served in the Marine Corps, Brooks mentored his fiancée, Kathleen Hardiman, in writing poetry. She enjoyed the experience so much that she began seeking out more such relationships with the emerging generation of Black poets.

Honors and Legacy

In 1968, Brooks was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held for the remaining thirty-two years of her life. In 1976, she became the first African American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1985, she was named the United States Poet Laureate—the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, as the position was then officially called.

The awards accumulated: the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, the National Medal of Arts, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Order of Lincoln (Illinois's highest honor). Schools and libraries were named for her. In 2018, a statue called "Gwendolyn Brooks: The Oracle of Bronzeville" was unveiled in a Chicago park that already bore her name.

But perhaps the most telling tributes are the ones that support other artists. The Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction has been awarded annually since 1969. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation's first academic center dedicated to Black poetry, takes its name from one of her poems.

The Work Itself

Brooks wrote in forms both traditional and experimental. Her early work showed mastery of sonnets and ballads, even as she infused them with the rhythms of blues and jazz. Her poems are known for their precise observation, their compression of meaning, their refusal to look away from difficult truths.

One of her most famous poems, "We Real Cool," consists of just eight lines. It captures the voices of young pool players at a hall called the Golden Shovel, each two-word statement landing with the weight of an epitaph:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

That final line arrives like a door closing. The poem mourns young Black men whose lives will be cut short, but it does so without sentimentality. It lets them speak.

At Home in Chicago

Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely Jr. in 1939, after meeting him through the NAACP Youth Council in Chicago. They had two children: Henry III and Nora. Henry Sr. died in 1996.

She lived her entire adult life in Chicago, never leaving the city that had shaped her. In a 1994 interview, she explained why:

Living in the city, I wrote differently than I would have if I had been raised in Topeka, KS... I am an organic Chicagoan. Living there has given me a multiplicity of characters to aspire for. I hope to live there the rest of my days. That's my headquarters.

She got her wish. Gwendolyn Brooks died at her Chicago home on December 3, 2000, at the age of eighty-three. She is buried in Lincoln Cemetery.

What Remains

Brooks's papers are now held by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, donated by her daughter Nora. Additional materials reside at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

But the real legacy lives in the work—and in the generations of poets who came after her, who found in her example permission to write about ordinary people with extraordinary attention, to claim both the mainstream and the margins, to insist that Black life in all its complexity was worthy of the highest art.

She was never just a symbol, never just a "first." She was a writer who loved to write, who looked out her window and saw her material, who spent more than six decades transforming what she observed into poems that continue to resonate. She was, as she said, just a writer. But there was nothing "just" about it.