gwendolyn brooks what did she write about

Toni Cade Bambara wrote in the New York Times Book Review that 'something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works-a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. In Saturday Review of Literature, Starr Nelson proclaimed the collection: 'a work of art and a poignant social document.' and Langston Hughes commented: 'the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks' book are alive, reaching, and very much of today.'Īfter attending the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in 1967, Brooks' work took a more overtly political stance and shows a deepening concern with social problems. In 1949, she became the first ever black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize with Annie Allen which tells the story of a black woman's passage from childhood to adulthood, against a backdrop of poverty and discrimination. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and Mademoiselle magazine named her one of its 'Ten Women of the Year.' Armed Forces during World War II.īrooks was celebrated as a major new voice in contemporary poetry for her technical expertise, innovative use of imagery and idiom, and new perspective on the lives of African Americans. The book also explores the unfair treatment of blacks in the U.S.

In this book, which bought her instant critical acclaim, Brooks chronicles the everyday lives, aspirations, and disappointments of the ordinary black people in her own neighborhood.

While working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she developed her poetic craft, publishing her first collection A Street in Bronzeville in 1945. These four academies gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city, which was to influence the rest of her writing life. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. She attended the leading white high school in Illinois, but transferred to an all-black school, then to an integrated school. Brooks was thirteen when her first published poem, ‘Eventide’, appeared in American Childhood by seventeen she had published a number of poems in Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s black population. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor her mother a teacher and classically trained pianist. Gwendolyn Brooks grew up in Chicago in a poor yet stable and loving family.

Gwendolyn brooks what did she write about