Gwendolyn Brooks --awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her second volume of verse, named poet laureate of the state of Illinois in 1968, succeeding Carl Sandburg, and appointed to the prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976, -- was born in Topeka, Kansas on June 7, 1917, the granddaughter of a runaway slave, and grew up in the slums of Chicago. Her parents were David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, formerly an elementary schoolteacher. From the time she was one month old, Ms. Brooks lived with her family, which later came to include a brother, Raymond, in the sprawling black ghetto on the South Side of Chicago.
Her economically deprived but respectable upbringing was enriched by her parents’ love of education and culture. Keziah brooks composed songs and “storyettes” to amuse her children; David Brooks read them daily selections from his prized set of Harvard Classics. Encouraged by her parents, Ms. Brooks read widely and was especially fond of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Canadian novelist who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the black poet.
A solitary child, she preferred the company of her books to that of her classmates at the Forestville Elementary School and, later, at the more elite Frances Willard School. “I was very ill-adjusted,” she told Phyl Garland in an interview for Ebony (July 1968). “I couldn’t skate, I was never a good rope-jumper, and I can remember thinking I must be a very inferior kind of child since I couldn’t play jacks.”
Despite her intellectual bent, Ms. Brooks’ scholastic achievements were, by her own estimation, “very poor.” “At my best, I was average.” She admitted to garland. “I spent more time brooding over my relations with other children than I did thinkig about my lessons.” She found it so difficult to adjust that she attended three different high schools. Her overriding pleasure was “putting rhymes together,” in her composition notebooks, which she filled with “careful rhymes” and “lofty meditations” on nature, love, and death. [Click Here To Read More]
Her economically deprived but respectable upbringing was enriched by her parents’ love of education and culture. Keziah brooks composed songs and “storyettes” to amuse her children; David Brooks read them daily selections from his prized set of Harvard Classics. Encouraged by her parents, Ms. Brooks read widely and was especially fond of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Canadian novelist who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the black poet.
A solitary child, she preferred the company of her books to that of her classmates at the Forestville Elementary School and, later, at the more elite Frances Willard School. “I was very ill-adjusted,” she told Phyl Garland in an interview for Ebony (July 1968). “I couldn’t skate, I was never a good rope-jumper, and I can remember thinking I must be a very inferior kind of child since I couldn’t play jacks.”
Despite her intellectual bent, Ms. Brooks’ scholastic achievements were, by her own estimation, “very poor.” “At my best, I was average.” She admitted to garland. “I spent more time brooding over my relations with other children than I did thinkig about my lessons.” She found it so difficult to adjust that she attended three different high schools. Her overriding pleasure was “putting rhymes together,” in her composition notebooks, which she filled with “careful rhymes” and “lofty meditations” on nature, love, and death. [Click Here To Read More]
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