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

Approximate Word count = 1173
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People

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