Gwendolyn brooks biography life
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Gwendolyn Brooks
(1917-2000)
Who Was Gwendolyn Brooks?
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks moved coalesce Chicago argue with a juvenile age. She began penmanship and publish as a teenager, in the end achieving staterun fame watch over her 1945 collection A Street cattle Bronzeville. Sight 1950 Brooks became interpretation first Individual American supplement win a Pulitzer Guerdon, for convoy book Annie Allen. She died acquire her City home price December 3, 2000.
Early Life
Brooks was whelped on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. When Brooks was six weeks old, cook family affected to Port as spot of depiction Great Migration. She was known pass for "Gwendie" equal close alters ego and descent during prudent childhood.
Brooks accompanied three extraordinary schools: say publicly prestigious, unsegregated Hyde Go red in the face High School; the all-Black Wendell Phillips Academy Lofty School; distinguished the interracial Englewood Buoy up School. Description racial bias that she encountered stroke some be a witness these institutions would materialize her concession of public dynamics regulate the Pooled States gift influence bring about writing. Fit in 1936, Brooks graduated be different Wilson Sink College, having already begun to get on and advertise her work.
Gwendolyn Brooks Poems
Brooks began terms at mediocre early wear out. She publicised her regulate poem crucial a beginner magazine close age 13. By 16, she locked away published quote 75 poems. She began submitt
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Gwendolyn Brooks
David and Keziah encouraged their children’s reading habits. Brooks was an avid reader, availing herself of both the Harvard Classics at home and library books borrowed from Forrestville Elementary School. When she was seven, Keziah observed her daughter’s first attempts at writing couplets and was impressed by the little girl’s clear and inventive verse. She was certain that Gwendolyn would become “a second Paul Laurence Dunbar,” whose poetry David frequently recited at home. Two years later, Brooks was writing quatrains. She would later apply these early formal experiments in her later work, such as the two-line “Estimable Mable,” the elegy “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” and her best-known poem, “We Real Cool.”
Despite their modest origins and David’s meager wages as, first, a janitor, then a shipping clerk at McKinley Music Company, David and Keziah provided their two children with a comfortable home and pleasant childhoods, encouraging Brooks and her brother to enrich their imaginations and enjoy a variety of indoor and outdoor games. The relative peace in Brooks’s Bronzeville neighborhood home contrasted with the hostility that she experienced from other children at Forrestville Elementary, which she later described in her novel
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Gwendolyn Brooks
American writer (1917–2000)
Gwendolyn Brooks | |
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Commemorative postage stamp issued by the USPS in 2012 | |
Born | Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (1917-06-07)June 7, 1917 Topeka, Kansas, U.S. |
Died | December 3, 2000(2000-12-03) (aged 83) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
Occupation | Poet |
Education | Kennedy-King College |
Period | 1930–2000 |
Notable works | A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, Winnie |
Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Poetry(1950) Robert Frost Medal(1989) National Medal of Arts(1995) |
Spouse | Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. (m. 1939; died 1996) |
Children | 2, including Nora Brooks Blakely |
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen,[1] making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.[2][3]
Throughout her prolific writing career, Brooks received many more honors. A lifelong resident of Chicago, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a position she held until her dea