Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry. She was a much-honored poet, even in her lifetime, with the distinction of being the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position—and poet laureate of the State of Illinois. Many of Brooks’s works display a political consciousness, especially those from the 1960s and later, with several of her poems reflecting the civil rights activism of that period. 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 classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter’s passion for reading and writing. Brooks was 13 when her first published poem, “Eventide,” appeared in American Childhood; by the time she was 17 she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s African American population. After attending junior college and working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she developed her craft in poetry workshops and began writing the poems, focusing on urban Black experience, that comprised her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945).

Her poems in A Street in Bronzeville and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen (1949) were “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. Brooks once described her style as “folksy narrative,” but she varied her forms, using free verse, sonnets, and other models. 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,” while Saturday Review of Literature contributor Starr Nelson called that volume “a work of art and a poignant social document.” In Annie Allen, which follows the experiences of a Black girl as she grows into adulthood, Brooks married social issues, especially around gender, with experimentation: one section of the book is an epic poem, “The Anniad”—a play on The Aeneid. 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 first and only novel, Maud Martha (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. Eventually, Maud takes a stand for her own dignity by turning her back on a patronizing, racist store clerk. One way of looking at the book, then,” commented Harry B. Shaw “is as a war with… people’s concepts of beauty.” In a Black World review, Annette Oliver Shands noted the way in which “Brooks does not specify traits, niceties or assets for members of the Black community to acquire in order to attain their just rights… So, this is not a novel to inspire social advancement on the part of fellow Blacks. Nor does it say be poor, Black and happy. The message is to accept the challenge of being human and to assert humanness with urgency.”

Brooks’s 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 (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 depicted as the result of Brooks’s attendance at a gathering of Black writers at Fisk University in 1967; however, recent scholars such as Evie Shockley and Cheryl Clark challenge the idea that Brooks’s career can be so neatly divided. Clark, for example, has described In the Mecca as Brooks’s “final seminar on the Western lyric.” Brooks herself noted that the poets at Fisk were committed to writing as Blacks, about Blacks, and for a Black audience. If many of her earlier poems had fulfilled this aim, it was not due to conscious intent, she said; but from this time forward, Brooks thought of herself as an African determined not to compromise social comment for the sake of technical proficiency.

Although In the Mecca and Brooks’s subsequent works have been characterized as possessing what a Virginia Quarterly Review critic called “raw power and roughness,” several commentators emphasized that these poems are neither bitter nor vengeful. Instead, according to Cook, they are more “about bitterness” than bitter in themselves. 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 has lost a small daughter in the block-long ghetto tenement, the Mecca; the 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,” who “was royalty when poised, / sly, at the A and P’s fly-open door,” under a Jamaican resident’s cot, murdered. R. Baxter Miller, writing in Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960, 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, occasioned by the death of Malcolm X or the dedication of a mural of Black heroes painted on a Chicago slum building, express Brooks’s commitment to her community’s awareness of themselves as a political as well as a cultural entity.

Brooks’s activism and her interest in nurturing Black literature led her to leave major publisher Harper & Row in favor of fledgling Black publishing companies. In the 1970s, she chose Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press to publish her poetry collections Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), Aurora (1972), and Beckonings (1975) and Report from Part One (1972), the first volume of her autobiography. She 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—formerly Don L. Lee, one of the young poets she had met during the 1960s—also brought many Brooks titles into print. Brooks was the first writer to read in Broadside’s original Poet’s Theatre series and was also 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 brought out by Black publishers were given only brief notice by critics of the literary establishment because they “did not wish to encourage Black publishers.”

Later Brooks poems continue to deal with political subjects and figures, such as South African activist Winnie Mandela, the onetime wife of antiapartheid leader—and later president of the country—Nelson Mandela. Brooks once told interviewer George Stavros: “I want to write poems that will be non-compromising. I don’t want to stop a concern with words doing good jobs, which has always been a concern of mine, but I want to write poems that will be meaningful… things that will touch them.” Brooks’s work was objective about human nature, several reviewers observed. Janet Overmeyer noted in the Christian Science Monitor that Brooks’s “particular, outstanding, genius is her unsentimental regard and respect for all human beings… She neither foolishly pities nor condemns—she creates.” Overmeyer continued, “From her poet’s craft bursts a whole gallery of wholly alive persons, preening, squabbling, loving, weeping; many a novelist cannot do so well in ten times the space.” Littlejohn maintained that Brooks achieves this effect through a high “degree of artistic control,” further relating, “The words, lines, and arrangements have been worked and worked and worked again into poised exactness: the unexpected apt metaphor, the mock-colloquial asides amid jewelled phrases, the half-ironic repetitions—she knows it all.” More important, Brooks’s objective treatment of issues such as poverty and racism “produces genuine emotional tension,” the critic wrote.

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 that 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.” In the future, she envisioned “the profound and frequent shaking of hands, which in Africa is so important. The shaking of hands in warmth and strength and union.”

Brooks put some of the finishing touches on the second volume of her autobiography while serving as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Brooks was 68 when she became the first Black woman to be appointed to the post. 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 “out of her own pocket, which, despite her modest means, is of legendary depth,” Reginald Gibbons related in Chicago Tribune Books. She honored and encouraged many poets in her state through the Illinois Poets Laureate Awards and Significant Illinois Poets Awards programs.

Proving the breadth of Brooks’s appeal, poets representing a wide variety of “races and… poetic camps” gathered at the University of Chicago to celebrate the poet’s 70th birthday in 1987, Gibbons reported. Brooks brought them together, he said, “in… a moment of good will and cheer.” In recognition of her service and achievements, a junior high school in Harvey, Illinois, was named for her, and she was similarly honored by Western Illinois University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature. In 2017 celebrations of the centenary of Brooks’s birth were held at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where Gwendolyn Brooks’s papers are held.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen,[1] making her the first African American to receive the Pulitzer.[2]

Throughout her prolific writing career, Brooks received many more honors. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a position she held until her death,[3] and what is now the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 1985–86 term.[4] In 1976, she became the first African-American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[5]

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas and at six weeks old was taken to Chicago, where she lived the rest of her life. Her parents, especially her mother, encouraged her poetry writing. She began submitting poems to various publications as a teenager. After graduating high school during the Great Depression, she took a two-year junior college program, worked as a typist, married, and had children. Continuing to write and submit her work, she finally found substantial outlets for her poetry. This recognition of her work also led her to lecturing and teaching aspiring writers. Being the winner of multiple awards for her writing, several schools and institutions have been named in her honor.

Contents

1 Early life

2 Career

2.1 Writing

2.2 Teaching

2.3 Archives

3 Family life

4 Honors and legacy

4.1 Honors

4.2 Legacy

5 Works

6 See also

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

Early life

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas.[2] She was the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah (Wims) Brooks. Her father, a janitor for a music company, had hoped to pursue a career as a doctor but sacrificed that aspiration to get married and raise a family. Her mother was a school teacher as well as a concert pianist trained in classical music. Brooks' mother had taught at the Topeka school that later became involved in the famous Brown v. Board of Education racial desegregation case.[6] Family lore held that Brooks' paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join the Union forces during the American Civil War.[7]

When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, and from then on, Chicago remained her home. She went to school at Forestville Elementary School on the South Side of Chicago. According to biographer Kenny Jackson Williams, Brooks then attended a prestigious integrated high school in the city with a predominantly white student body, Hyde Park High School, transferred to the all-black Wendell Phillips High School, and then moved to the integrated Englewood High School. After completing high school, she graduated in 1936 from a two-year program at Wilson Junior College, now known as Kennedy-King College. Brooks graduated from high school in 1935, by this time she was already a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender.

After college, Brooks worked for a short time as a maid and secretary to Dr. E. N. French. French was a spiritual adviser who sold charms and potions to the unfortunate. French appears to have influenced Brooks in the writing of such characters as Prophet Williams in her epic In The Mecca.

Due to the social dynamics of the various schools, in conjunction with time period in which she attended them, Brooks faced racial injustice that over time contributed to her understanding of the prejudice and bias in established systems and dominant institutions in her own surroundings as well as every relevant mindset of the country.[8]

Brooks began writing at an early age and her mother encouraged her, saying, ''You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar."[9] After her early educational experiences, Brooks never pursued a four-year college degree because she knew she wanted to be a writer and considered it unnecessary. "I am not a scholar," she later said. "I'm just a writer who loves to write and will always write."[10] She worked as a typist to support herself while she pursued her career.[10]

She would closely identify with Chicago for the rest of her life. In a 1994 interview, she remarked on this:

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.[10]

Career

'Song of Winnie', Library Walk, New York City

Writing

Brooks published her first poem, "Eventide", in a children's magazine, American Childhood, when she was 13 years old.[5] By the age of 16, she had already written and published approximately 75 poems. At 17, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows," the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Her poems, many published while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse. In her early years, she received commendations on her poetic work and encouragement from James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.[11] James Weldon Johnson sent her the first critique of her poems when she was only sixteen years old.

Her characters were often drawn from the inner city life that Brooks knew well. She said, "I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material."[2]

By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. A particularly influential one was organized by Inez Cunningham Stark, an affluent white woman with a strong literary background. Stark offered writing workshops at the new South Side Community Art Center, which Brooks attended.[12] It was here she gained momentum in finding her voice and a deeper knowledge of the techniques of her predecessors. Renowned poet Langston Hughes stopped by the workshop and heard her read "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee."[12] In 1944, she achieved a goal she had been pursuing through continued unsolicited submissions since she was 14 years old: two of her poems were published in Poetry magazine's November issue. In the autobiographical information she provided to the magazine, she described her occupation as a "housewife".[13]

Brooks' published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), with Harper & Brothers, after a strong show of support to the publisher from author Richard Wright. He said to the editors who solicited his opinion on Brooks' work:

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.[12]

The book earned instant critical acclaim for its authentic and textured portraits of life in Bronzeville. Brooks later said it was a glowing review by Paul Engle in the Chicago Tribune that "initiated My Reputation."[12] Engle stated that Brooks' poems were no more "Negro poetry" than Robert Frost's work was "white poetry". Brooks received her first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and was included as one of the "Ten Young Women of the Year" in Mademoiselle magazine.[14]

Brooks' second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), focused on the life and experiences of a young Black girl growing into womanhood in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The book was awarded the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and was also awarded Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize.[9]

In 1953, Brooks published her first and only narrative book, a novella titled Maud Martha, which in a series of 34 vignettes follows the life of a black woman named Maud Martha Brown as she moves about life from childhood to adulthood. It tells the story of "a woman with doubts about herself and where and how she fits into the world. Maud's concern is not so much that she is inferior but that she is perceived as being ugly," states author Harry B. Shaw in his book Gwendolyn Brooks.[15] Maud suffers prejudice and discrimination not only from white individuals but also from black individuals who have lighter skin tones than hers, something that is a direct reference to Brooks' personal experience. Eventually, Maud stands up for herself by turning her back on a patronizing and racist store clerk. "The book is ... about the triumph of the lowly," Shaw comments.[15] In contrast, literary scholar Mary Helen Washington emphasizes Brooks's critique of racism and sexism, calling Maud Martha "a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred, and the silence that results from suppressed anger."[16]

In 1967, the year of Langston Hughes's death, Brooks attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Nashville's Fisk University. Here, according to one version of events, she met activists and artists such as Imamu Amiri Baraka, Don L. Lee and others who exposed her to new black cultural nationalism. Recent studies argue that she had been involved in leftist politics in Chicago for many years and, under the pressures of McCarthyism, adopted a black nationalist posture as a means of distancing herself from her prior political connections.[17] Brooks's experience at the conference inspired many of her subsequent literary activities. She taught creative writing to some of Chicago's Blackstone Rangers, otherwise a violent criminal gang. In 1968, she published one of her most famous works, In the Mecca, a long poem about a mother's search for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building. The poem was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.[14]

Her autobiographical Report From Part One, including reminiscences, interviews, photographs and vignettes, came out in 1972, and Report From Part Two was published in 1995, when she was almost 80.[5]

Teaching

Brooks said her first teaching experience was at the University of Chicago when she was invited by author Frank London Brown to teach a course in American literature. It was the beginning of her lifelong commitment to sharing poetry and teaching writing.[10] Brooks taught extensively around the country and held posts at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, and City College of New York.[18]

Archives

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired Brooks's archives from her daughter Nora Blakely.[19] In addition, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has a collection of her personal papers, especially from 1950 to 1989.[20][21]

Family life

In 1939, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., who she met after joining Chicago’s NAACP Youth Council.[5] They had two children: Henry Lowington Blakely III, and Nora Brooks Blakely.[2] Brooks' husband died in 1996.[22]

From mid-1961 to late 1964, Henry III served in the U.S. Marine Corps, first at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and then at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay. During this time, Brooks mentored his fiancée, Kathleen Hardiman, in writing poetry. Upon his return, Blakely and Hardiman married in 1965.[12] Brooks had so enjoyed the mentoring relationship that she began to engage more frequently in that role with the new generation of young black poets.[12]

Gwendolyn Brooks died at her Chicago home on December 3, 2000.[2]

Honors and legacy

Honors

1946, Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.[2]

1950, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry[2] Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950 became the first African-American to be given a Pulitzer Prize. It was awarded for the volume, Annie Allen, which chronicled in verse the life of an ordinary black girl growing up in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago's South Side.[23]

1968, appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000[2]

1969, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[24]

1976, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters[5]

1976, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America[25]

1985, selected as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an honorary one-year term, known as the Poet Laureate of the United States[2]

1988, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame[26]

1989, awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America[27]

1994, chosen to present the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture.[2]

1994, received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters[28]

1995, presented with the National Medal of Arts[29]

1997, awarded the Order of Lincoln, the highest honor granted by the State of Illinois.[30]

1999, awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement[31]

Legacy

1970: Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois[32]

1990: Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, Chicago State University[33]

1995: Gwendolyn Brooks Elementary School, Aurora, Illinois

2001: Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, Chicago, Illinois[34]

2002: 100 Greatest African Americans[35]

2002: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Oak Park, Illinois[36]

2003: Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library, Springfield, Illinois[37][38]

2004: Hyacinth Park in Chicago was renamed Gwendolyn Brooks Park.[39]

2010: Inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.[40]

2012: Honored on a United States' postage stamp.[41]

2017: Various centennial events in Chicago marked what would have been her 100th birthday.[42]

2017–18: "Our Miss Brooks @ 100" (OMB100) a celebration of the life of Brooks (born June 7, 1917), which ran through June 17, 2018. The opening ceremony on February 2, 2017, at the Art Institute of Chicago featured readings and discussions of Brooks' influence by Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gregory Pardlo, Tracy K. Smith, and Natasha Trethewey.[43][44]

2018: On what would have been her 101st birthday, a statue of her, titled "Gwendolyn Brooks: The Oracle of Bronzeville", was unveiled at Gwendolyn Brooks Park in Chicago.[45]

Works

The Poetry Foundation lists these works among others:

A Street in Bronzeville, Harper, 1945.

Annie Allen, Harper, 1949.

Maud Martha, Harper, 1953.

Bronzeville Boys and Girls, Harper, 1956.

The Bean Eaters, Harper, 1960.

In the Mecca, Harper, 1968.

For Illinois 1968: A Sesquicentennial Poem, Harper, 1968.

Riot, Broadside Press, 1969.

Family Pictures, Broadside Press, 1970.

Aloneness, Broadside Press, 1971.

Report from Part One: An Autobiography, Broadside Press, 1972.

Black Love, Brooks Press, 1982.

Mayor Harold Washington; and, Chicago, the I Will City, Brooks Press, 1983.

The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems, David Co., 1987.

Winnie, Third World Press, 1988.

Report from Part Two, Third World Press, 1996.

In Montgomery, and Other Poems, Third World Press, 2003.

Several collections of multiple works by Brooks were also published.[15]

Gwendolyn Brooks, who illuminated the black experience in America in poems that spanned most of the 20th century, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, died yesterday at her home in Chicago. She was 83.

''I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street,'' Ms. Brooks once said. ''I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material.''

In Ms. Brooks's early poetry, Chicago's vast black South Side is called Bronzeville. It was ''A Street in Bronzeville,'' her first poetry anthology, that attracted the attention of the literary establishment in 1945.

The Bronzeville poems were recommended to the editors of Harper & Row by Richard Wright, who admired her ability to capture ''the pathos of petty destinies, the whimper of the wounded, the tiny incidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problems of common prejudice.''

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But it was more than Ms. Brooks's ability to write about struggling black people, particularly black women. There was also her mastery of the language of poetry.

''Miss Brooks has a command over both the colloquial and the more austere rhythms,'' the critic Rolfe Humphries wrote in The New York Times Book Review about the poems in ''A Street in Bronzeville.'' Calling her ''a real poet,'' Mr. Humphries said of her technique, ''There is a range of form: quatrains, free verse, ballads, sonnets -- all appropriately controlled.''

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Ms. Brooks said that her reputation was bolstered by a review of ''Bronzeville'' in The Chicago Tribune by Paul Engle, a poet and founder of the Iowa Writers School. Mr. Engle maintained that her poems were no more ''Negro poetry'' than Robert Frost's poetry was ''white poetry.''

Among the poems in ''Bronzeville' was ''the old-marrieds,'' a portrait of an aging couple:

But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.

Though the pretty-coated birds had piped so lightly all

the day.

And he had seen the lovers in the little side-streets.

And she had heard the morning stories clogged with

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sweets.

It was quite a time for loving. It was midnight. It was

May.

But in the crowded darkness not a word did they say.

In ''A Street in Bronzeville'' Ms. Brooks created such indelible figures as the old, alienated Matthew Cole, who could only smile at such memories as ''say, thoughts of a little boy licorice-full/Without a nickel for Sunday School,'' and Satin Legs Smith, awakening on a Sunday:

He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days.

And his desertedness, his intricate fear, the

Postponed resentments and the prim precautions.

In 1946 and 1947, Ms. Brooks was awarded a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1949, she published her second volume of verse, ''Annie Allen,'' a portrait of a Bronzeville girl as a daughter, a wife and a mother, experiencing loneliness, loss, death and poverty. The critics praised her use of an experimental form she called the sonnet-ballad. ''Full of insight and wisdom and pity, technically dazzling,'' Phyllis McGinley wrote in The Times Book Review.

''Annie Allen'' won Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize in 1949 and the following year, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Ms. Brooks became the first black writer to receive the prize since it was established in 1917. She acknowledged that it transformed her life.

''That's why I am as well known as I am today,'' she said in a 1987 interview. ''Sometimes,'' she added with a smile, ''I feel that my name is Gwendolyn Pulitzer Brooks.''

Ms. Brooks wrote a novel, ''Maud Martha,'' which received scant consideration when it was published in 1953. ''Maud Martha'' traced the life of a Bronzeville woman from childhood to maturity and motherhood through a series of 34 vignettes.

The reader meets Maud as a lonely, overweight girl of 7, follows her through a dreamy adolescence and finally sees her as a young newlywed living ''in a sad gray building in a cold white world,'' married to a man numbed by his struggle with white society.

But Ms. Brooks's novel was overshadowed by her achievements as a poet and invidiously compared with Richard Wright's ''Native Son'' and Ralph Ellison's ''Invisible Man,'' epic novels with clear-cut socio-political themes. In recent years, however, ''Maud Martha'' has had a rebirth, and it is now regarded in some critical circles as an important forerunner of prominent themes in the works of today's female writers.

''Bronzeville Boys and Girls,'' a collection of children's poetry, appeared in 1956, followed by two poetry collections, ''The Bean Eaters'' (1960) and ''Selected Poems'' (1963). Critics noticed that Ms. Brooks's vision was expanding from considerations of the everyday experiences of Bronzeville to a wider world that included the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and the racial tensions in Little Rock in 1957.

They also noticed -- and most applauded -- a sharper colloquial style that was emerging in poems like ''We Real Cool'' from ''The Bean Eaters'':

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk Late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

By the early 1960's, Ms. Brooks had reached a high point in her writing career. She was regarded as a grande dame of America's black writers and an honored member of the literary elite, a sought-after teacher, a poet who was valued for her sensitive portraits of black women, her precise use of language and the universality of her work. But by the end of the decade she had transformed herself and her poetry -- a reflection of the new political dynamics that were sweeping across all the Bronzevilles of America.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in Topeka, Kan., on June 7, 1917, but grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where she remained till she died. Her parents, David Anderson Brooks and the former Keziah Corinne Wims, encouraged her and her younger brother, Raymond, to read and take an interest in culture from an early age.

Gwendolyn began writing poetry before she was a teenager, filling composition books with ''careful rhymes'' and ''lofty meditations.'' Her mother was an enthusiastic supporter, often telling her, ''You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.'' Ms. Brooks published her first poem, ''Eventide,'' in American Childhood when she was 13.

Prompted by her mother, the teenager sent her poems to Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. Mr. Hughes, who would become her friend and longtime supporter, wrote back: ''You have talent. Keep writing! You'll have a book published one day.'' Mr. Johnson also responded with encouragement, urging her to read such modern poets as Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings and T. S. Eliot. By the age of 16, Ms. Brooks had become a regular contributor to the ''Lights and Shadows'' column of The Chicago Defender, where many of her earliest poems appeared.

Three years after her graduation from the newly opened Woodrow Wilson Junior College in Chicago in 1936, Ms. Brooks married Henry L. Blakely, a young writer who later published a volume of his own poetry. They lived in Chicago for the next 30 years, divorced in 1969 but reunited in 1973. Her survivors include a daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, and a son, Henry Blakely.

Ms. Brooks's poetry shifted noticeably in form and concern after she attended a conference of black writers at Fisk University in the spring of 1967. While there she listened to readings by Amiri Baraka, Ron Milner and other young firebrand poets. ''I felt that something new was happening,'' she later said.

Those young black writers ''seemed so proud and committed to their own people,'' she added. ''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.''

Returning to Chicago, she began a poetry workshop in her home that included members of a Chicago street gang called the Blackstone Rangers and younger poets like Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee and Nikki Giovanni. Much of the talk was devoted to ways of merging the concept of black art with the political concept of black power.

These currents were evident in Ms. Brooks's next volume of poetry, ''In the Mecca'' (Harper 1968). The 30-page title poem described a mother's frantic search for her missing daughter in a sprawling, decrepit building called the Mecca, which once was one of Chicago's fanciest apartment houses.

In a volume that was described by one critic as ''her declaration of independence'' from the integrationist pursuit that had previously shaped her work, Ms. Brooks wrote about the desperate and tragic lives of the inhabitants of the Mecca. She wrote from experience. Ms. Brooks worked at the real Mecca as a typist for a ''spiritual adviser'' when she was young and got to know the people in the building.

The collection also offered poems about Malcolm X and the Blackstone Rangers:

Black, raw, ready.

Sores in the city

That do not want to heal.

Ms. Brooks used clipped lines, abstract word patterns and random rhymes to capture her new radical tone and her more direct expression of social concern.

''In the Mecca'' was nominated for a National Book Award.

Asked if the change in work signaled her emergence as a ''protest poet,'' Ms. Brooks said, ''No matter what the theme is, I still want the poem to be a poem, not just a piece of propaganda.'' Ms. Brooks reflected the change in her 1988 poem ''Winnie'':

I am tired of little tight-fisted poems sitting down to

shape perfect unimportant pieces.

Poems that cough lightly -- catch a sneeze.

This is the time for Big Poems

roaring up out of the sleaze,

poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.

After the publication of ''In the Mecca'' Ms. Brooks left her longtime mainstream publisher, Harper & Row. ''Rio'' (1969), her next volume of poetry, was published by Broadside Press, a small, Detroit-based black company. The change, she said, reflected her desire to support struggling black publishers and the young poets they published as well as her intention to address her work to black readers.

With the new direction of her work and the lack of a major mainstream publisher, however, many of her subsequent books were brushed aside by reviewers for mainstream publications. From the 1970's to the 1990's, she published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nearly a dozen nonfiction titles, which included two autobiographical works -- ''Report From Part One'' (1972) and ''Report From Part Two'' (1995).

Despite the lack of media attention, Ms. Brooks maintained her reputation as one of America's most respected literary figures. In 1968, she succeeded Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois. In 1976, she became the first black woman to be elected to the 250-member National Institute of Arts and Letters. She received a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989 and another from the National Book Foundation in 1994. She was the recipient of more than 50 honorary degrees.

The Gwendolyn Brooks Chair in Black Literature and Creative Writing was established at Chicago State University in 1990, and there is a Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature at Western Illinois University and a Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School just south of Chicago in Harvey, Ill. She was selected by the National Endowment of the Humanities as its Jefferson Lecturer in 1994 -- ''the absolute award crown of my career,'' she said. And in 1995 she received the National Medal of Arts award.

Despite such praise, Ms. Brooks preferred to stay outside what she called ''the hollow land of fame'' and quietly live and work on the South Side.

''All my life is not writing,'' Ms. Brooks once told an interviewer. ''My greatest interest is being involved with young people.'' To that end, she devoted much time to giving readings at schools, prisons and hospitals and attending annual poetry contests for school-age youngsters, which she sponsored, judged, and often paid for out of her own pocket.

During her later years, Ms. Brooks tempered her assessment of the young poets of the 60's who had criticized her subjectivity and attention to form. ''Many of the poets felt it was a mark of their quality, of their black and Hispanic quality, if they didn't put a lot of emphasis on technique,'' she said. Although she still sought to write poetry that was ''direct'' and appealed to ''all manner of blacks,'' she insisted on maintaining her own standards.

''I don't want to imitate these young people,'' she said. ''I have got to find a way of writing that will accomplish my purpose but still sound Gwendolynian.''

A Gwendolyn Brooks Sampler

''the vacant lot,'' from ''A Street in Bronzeville'' (1945):

Mrs. Corley's three-flat brick

Isn't here any more.

All done with seeing her fat little form

Burst out of the basement door;

And with seeing her African son-in-law

(Rightful heir to the throne)

With his great white strong cold squares of teeth

And his little eyes of stone;

And with seeing the squat fat daughter

Letting in the men

When majesty has gone for the day --

And letting them out again.

''The Egg Boiler,'' from ''The Bean Eaters'' (1961):

Being you, you cut your poetry from wood.

The boiling of an egg is heavy art.

You come upon it as an artist should,

With rich-eyed passion and with straining heart.

We fools, we cut our poems out of air,

Night color, wind soprano, and such stuff.

And sometimes weightlessness is much to bear.

You mock it, though, you name it Not Enough.

The egg, spooned gently to the avid pan,

And left the strict three minutes, or the four,

Is your Enough and art for any man.

We fools give courteous ear -- then cut some more,

Shaping a gorgeous Nothingness from the cloud.

You watch us, eat your egg, and laugh aloud.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, and raised in Chicago. She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (The David Co., 1987); To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986); Riot (Broadside Press, 1969); In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1968); The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960); Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945).

She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (Harper, 1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Broadside Press, 1971).

In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois. In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now known as Poet Laureate. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991)

Winnie (The David Co., 1988)

Blacks (The David Co., 1987)

The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986)

To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981)

Beckonings (Broadside Press, 1975)

Aurora (Broadside Press, 1972)

Aloneness (Broadside Press, 1971)

The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (Harper & Row, 1971)

Riot (Broadside Press, 1970)

Family Pictures (Broadside Press, 1970)

In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1968)

The Wall (Broadside Press, 1967)

We Real Cool (Broadside Press, 1966)

Selected Poems (Harper & Row, 1963)

The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960)

Bronzeville Boys and Girls (Harper, 1956)

Annie Allen (Harper, 1949)

A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945)

Prose

Primer for Blacks (Black Position Press, 1981)

Young Poet’s Primer (Brooks Press, 1981)

A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (Broadside Press, 1975)

Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972)

Maud Martha (Harper, 1953)