Gwendolyn Brooks

Where it All Began...

 

Writing since a young girl, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry was inspired by her life around and the things she encountered. Gwendolyn Brooks was very conservative as a child, which resulted in her not having many friends. She spent most of free time reading and writing stories and poetry. Many of her verse were featured in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper written specifically for the African American people of their area. She also worked for this newspaper company and put many of her poems and its columns. Her first published poem was “Eventide” in the American Childhood Magazine in 1930. A few years later, Gwendolyn met two men by the names of James Johnson and Langston Hughes. These two men encourage her to explore modern poetry and to write as often as she could. In the year of 1945, she published her first book of poetry and received major recognition for it. “She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine's "Ten Young Women of the Year," she won her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time to the present, she has seen the recipient of a number of awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane Letters.” [Excerpt from her biography].

 

“We Real Cool” is Gwendolyn’s most famous poem. It is a fairly short poem about some young boys she saw in a pool room hanging with gamblers: all on a school day. She was appalled by their boldness and bravery which, in return, inspired her to write a poem about it. This poem often gets much attention, even though she wrote many other great works of poetry. “What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project” is a quote that speaks for all of her poetry depicted the city life in Chicago and her daily encounters.