Born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Gwendolyn Brooks was a lyrical chronicler of the black urban experience in America. In 1950, she became the first African-American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. She began writing poetry as a young girl, 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 name for the predominately African-American South Side of Chicago.) Over the next several years, Brooks won a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters 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 new level of literary and popular acclaim. A novel, Maud Martha (1953), was less successful than Brooks poetry, which continued to meet with critical and popular success throughout the next decade. A collection of childrens poems, entitled Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), was followed by The Bean Eaters (1960), widely considered to contain some of her finest verse, and Selected Poems (1963). In the latter half of the 1960s, Brooks poetry became mroe radical and took on a more explicit tone of social concern, a transition that coincided with the politically charged atmosphere of the de...
