Gwendolyn Brooks was an American teacher, poet and writer. She was conceived in Topeka, Kansas, on 7th June 7, 1917. She was brought up in Chicago. Her works dealt with the struggles and sufferings of native black community. She was the writer of over twenty books of verses, including ‘Children Coming Home’ in 1991, ‘Blacks’ in 1987, ‘To Disembark’ in 1981 and ‘In the Mecca’ in 1968. Besides these books she has a number of other publications as well.
She composed various different books including a novel, ‘Maud Martha’ in 1953, ‘Report from Part One: An Autobiography’ in 1972 and edited ‘Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology’ in 1971.
In 1968 she was named artist laureate for the territory of Illinois. In 1985, she was the main dark lady designated as specialist in verse to the Library of Congress, a post presently known as Poet Laureate. She got an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and partnerships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her demise on December 3, 2000.
A Short Biography of Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born 7th June 1917. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, the United States. She was the daughter of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Brooks. She was their first child. Her father worked as a driver for a music company. He wished to become a doctor but married and succumbed to family needs. Her mother served a school teacher. She was also a piano player and would play in concerts. Gwendolyn grandfather had escaped from slavery.
Her family shifted to Chicago during the era of the Great Migration. At that time, Gwendolyn was only six years old. Once they moved to Chicago, it became their home city.
She got admitted to Forestville Elementary School for her format education. This school was located at the southern side of Chicago. Afterwards, she attended Hyde Park High School. It was a prestigious and revered school in the city. It was a white school later on she shifted to Wendell Phillips High School which was all black students` school. However, she completed her schooling at Integrated Englewood High School.
She would change school frequently because she had to face racial segregations being a black lady. This made a deep mark on her mentality and she understood that prejudice against black was deeply rooted in American Society.
She started writing at an early stage of her life. Her mother encouraged her to write. She was a teenager and she started sending several of her poems to different publications and magazines. In 1935, when she graduated from her high school, she had become a regular member of ‘The Chicago Defender’ by regularly contributing to it.
She had decided to become a writer and thus she never attended a college for a four-year degree. She then decided to take a two-year degree program and joined Wilson Junior College, it is now known as Kennedy-King College. She graduated from it in 1936. In order to pursue her career, she started working as a typist.
She published her very first poem in ‘American Childhood’. She was only 13 years old when she published the poem. This poem was titled as ‘Eventide.’ As she reached the age of 16, she had written approximately 75 poems. She would write traditional ballads, sonnets and free verse poems.
Brooks lived inside the city and she had a good experience of it so it made her characters and themes.
Brooks Married Henry Lewington Blakely in 1939. They met after she joined Chicago`s NAACP Youth Council. The couple had two children. They are Henry Lewington Blakely III and Nora Brooks Blakely. Her husband, Henry Lewington Blakely, died in 1996.
She started taking part in poetry workshops by 1941. One of the workshops was organized by Inez Cunningham Stark. She was a wealthy white woman and had a great literary background. Brooke attended her writing workshops which she would offer at the New South Side Community Art Center. These workshops gave her the ability to present her voice in her poems. In one such training, she was reading a poem when Langston Hughes heard her. He appreciated her poetry and afterwards, she published her works in several notable magazines.
In 1945, she published her first book ‘A Street in Bronzeville.’ This book was a success and it earned a good critical response for its depiction of life in Bronzeville. In the wake of this, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946. She was also included in the ‘Ten Young Women of the Year’ in Mademoiselle Magazine.
In 1949, she published her second book of poetry, ‘Annie Alle.’ This book dealt with the experience of black girl living in Bronzeville. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950. It was honoured by Poetry Magazine1 Eunice Tietjens Prize.
Brooks published her first and last novella ‘Maud Martha’ in 1953. It is the tale of Maud Martha from her childhood to adulthood. During her journey, Maud had to face racism and discrimination.
She attended the Second Black Writers` Conference in 1967. It was held at Nashville`s Fisk University. Here she also met a number of Black activists and that shaped her writings and experiences. She published another poem ‘In the Mecca’ in 1968. This was her most famous work. It was a long poem which dealt with the search of a mother for a lost child. Arthur Frank London Brown invited her to the University of Chicago to teach a course in American Literature. This began her teaching career. Afterwards, she taught at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Columbia College Chicago, The City College of New York and Elmhurst College.
Gwendolyn Brooks died on 3rd December 2000. She was 83 years old when she died. She died in her home in Chicago.
Gwendolyn Brooks’ Writing Style
She started distributing her verses of Chicago’s extraordinary South Side during the 1940s. Soon, Gwendolyn Brooks became one of the most powerful American writers of the twentieth century. Her sonnets distil the absolute best parts of Modernist style with the sounds and states of different African-American structures and sayings. She is a quintessential portraitist who discovered universes in the network she worked out of, and her developments as a sonneteer stay a motivation to more than one age of artists who have come after her.
Her vocation in general offers a case of a craftsman who was happy to react and advance even with the sensational recorded, political, and stylish changes and difficulties she survived.
Her Style Variation
Most critics divide her imaginative life into two sections. The separating line was 1967, when at the Fisk authors’ gathering she had a disclosure. She stated that it terrifies her to understand that on the off chance that she had died before the age of fifty, she would have passed on a ‘negro’ part. She before long went out Harper and Row and heightened her relationship and connection with youthful dark writers, for example, Haki Madhubuti wearing her hair in what she called a characteristic, that generally emblematic of haircuts, the Afro. Further, the style of her work changed recognizably. The tight proper curl of her past work slackened and the inferences and references were no longer as thick.
Her topic didn’t change her subjects were still for the most part dark individuals who lived in the kitchenette lofts of Bronzeville. She was in case clear in her work about who dark individuals were and what it intended to expound on them. Her last assortment for Harper and Row was ‘In the Mecca’, distributed in 1968. She attempted to compose this significant sonnet for more than thirty years after her short spell working for a quack “profound guide” named French who sold love and luck mixtures entryway to entryway ‘In the Mecca’ high rise in Chicago.
The poem fixates on the dramatization of a kid named Pepita, who has disappeared in the warrens of the incapacitated structure. We meet the structure’s occupants who together structure a picture of a dark network along the lines of ‘A Street in Bronzeville’.However, “In the Mecca” the network is in emergency and has fallen prey to its own issues.
The kid, who is a writer and the expectation of her family and network, is discovered killed under the bed of one of the building`s inhabitants. The poem closes and shuts the principal half of the book in a horrendous silence that asks what next? The work ‘In the Mecca’ fills in as a response to that question as the network reconstitutes itself and finds a way of thinking with which to push ahead.
Her Major Concerns
Her works dealt with managing political subjects and figures, for example, South African dissident Winnie Mandela, the one time spouse of antiapartheid pioneer Nelson Mandela. She once told questioner George Stavros that she needed to compose poems that would be non-settling. She would prefer not to stop a worry with words doing steady employment, which had consistently been a worry of her. However, she needed to compose sonnets that would be significant things that will contact them. Brooks’ work was objective about human instinct.
Janet Overmeyer noted in the Christian Science Monitor that Brooks’ specific, exceptional, virtuoso was her unsentimental respect and regard for every single individual. She neither stupidly felt sorry for nor denounced. Overmeyer proceeded that from her artist’s art blasts an entire display of completely alive people, dressing, quarrelling, adoring, sobbing; numerous writers can’t do so well in multiple times space. Littlejohn kept up that Brooks accomplished this impact through a high level of creative control.
He further relates that the words, lines, and game plans have been worked and worked and worked again into ready precision. The sudden able allegory, the false everyday asides in the midst of jeweled expressions, the half-unexpected redundancies. More significant, Brooks’ target treatment of issues, for example, destitution and prejudice produced certified passionate strain.
