名人轶事42:Gwendolyn Brooks

By Cynthia Kirk

Broadcast: March 20, 2005

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VOICE ONE:

I’m Shirley Griffith.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Sarah Long with the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA.

Today we tell about the life of award-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She was

the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

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VOICE ONE:

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. She had more

than twenty books published. She was known around the world for using poetry

to increase understanding about black culture in America.

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote many poems about being black during the Nineteen-

Forties and Nineteen-Fifties. Her poems described conditions among the poor,

racial inequality and drug use in the black community. She also wrote poems

about the struggles of black women.

But her skill was more than her ability to write about struggling black

people. She was an expert at the language of poetry. She combined traditional

European poetry styles with the African American experience.

VOICE TWO:

Gwendolyn Brooks once said that she wrote about what she saw and heard in the

street. She said she found most of her material looking out of the window of

her second-floor apartment house in Chicago, Illinois.

In her early poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is where many black people live. In her poems, the

South Side is called Bronzeville. It was “A Street in Bronzeville” that

gained the attention of literary experts in Nineteen-Forty-Five. Critics

praised her poetic skill and her powerful descriptions about the black

experience during the time. The Bronzeville poems were her first published

collection.

Here she is reading from her Nineteen-Forty-Five collection, “A Street in

Bronzeville.”

((GWENDOLYN BROOKS))

“My father, it is surely a blue place and straight. Right, regular, where I

shall find no need for scholarly nonchalance or looks a little to the left or

guards upon the heart.”

VOICE ONE:

In Nineteen-Fifty, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African-American to win

the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. She won the prize for her second book of

poems called “Annie Allen.” “Annie Allen” is a collection of poetry about

the life of a Bronzeville girl as a daughter, a wife and mother. She

experiences loneliness, loss, death and being poor.

Mizz Brooks said that winning the prize changed her life.

Her next work was a novel written in Nineteen-Fifty-Three called “Maud

Martha.” “Maud Martha” received little notice when it first was published.

But now it is considered an important work by some critics. Its main ideas

about the difficult life of many women are popular among female writers

today.

VOICE TWO:

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poems about the black experience in America. She

described the anger many blacks had about racial injustice and the feeling of

being different. She used poetry to criticize those who did not show respect

for the poor. Yet for all the anger in her writing, Gwendolyn Brooks was

considered by many to be a gentle spirit and a very giving person.

By the early Nineteen-Sixties, Mizz Brooks had reached a high point in her

writing career. She was considered one of America’s leading black writers.

She was a popular teacher. She was praised for her use of language and the

way people identified with her writing.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas in Nineteen-Seventeen. But she

grew up in Chicago. She began writing when she was eleven years old. She

mailed several poems to a community newspaper in Chicago to surprise her

family.