Gwendolyn Brooks
A detailed Summary of Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black
community, particularly in the community's vision of itself. The constant in Brooks' poetry has
been her loyalty to characters who find themselves trapped in an environment scarred by racial
discrimination, poverty, and violence. Gwendolyn Brooks, the daughter of David Anderson
Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, was born on June 7,
1917, in Topeka Kansas. Brooks was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize for
poetry in 1950, and the first African-American woman to be inducted into the National Institute
of Arts and Letters. The Brook's family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth. Her parents
set a high priority on literature, and she began to collect her poems in notebooks at age eleven.
Gwendolyn had a difficult time in school and was rejected for her shyness as well as her skin
Brooks attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, but transferred
to the all-black Wendall Phillips, then to the integrated Englewood High School. In 1936 she
graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial

uses ordinary speech. Words that will heard to create effective poetry.
through careful examination of possible stylistic interpretations; whether it be finesse, rhythm or a
the title. The first line is "We real cool." The statement "We real cool" is fairly self-explanatory.
actually prove that the last line "We Die soon" is the real truth.
In the poem "We Real Cool," Gwendolyn Brooks uses street slang, repetition, and rhyme to
Some of the themes to Brooks' poetry include black pride, black identity and solidarity, and black
In "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" Brooks unveils another aspect of her skill by entering the
players to speak for themselves, revealing their lack of education, by the lack of grammar in their
Some common words found in the essay are:
Gwendolyn Brooks, Real Cool, Harlem Renaissance, June/We Die, , Letters Brook's, We/ Sing, real cool, Mabbie Brooks, Junior College, Alley Brooks, pool players, gwendolyn brooks, die soon, poem real cool, words real, we/left school, line die, poem real, stanza begins, line die soon, words real cool, inner city youths, inner city, real cool we/left,
Approximate Word count = 1173
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
Category: People
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