Brooks, Gwendolyn Essay -- Essays Papers

suffer, GwendolynPoet, writer. Born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. Throughout virtually of the twentieth century, Gwendolyn brook was a lyrical chronicler of the black urban mystify in America. In 1950, she became the first African-American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. brook grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. She began writing poetry as a young young woman, and by the age of 16 had begun publishing her poems regularly in The Chicago Defender. She attended the Woodrow Wilson Junior College in Chicago before marrying a fellow writer, Henry L. Blakely, in 1939. The couple lived together in Chicago, divorcing in 1969 but reuniting in 1973. They had two children, Nora Brooks Blakely and Henry Blakely Jr. Brooks earned a good deal of critical attention in 1945 with the publication of her first anthology of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville. (Bronzeville was Brooks account for the predominately African-American South Side of Chicago.) Over the next several years, Broo ks won a grant from the American Academy of Arts and garner and several fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. She published her second volume of verse, Annie Allen, in 1949. The book, which followed a Bronzeville girl throughout the stages of her life, was written in a loose, experimental form that Brooks called the sonnet-ballad. Annie Allen won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, catapulting Brooks to a whole reinvigorated level of literary and popular acclaim. A novel, Maud Martha (1953),...