Summary
In 1938, she married Henry Blakely. Their first child, Henry Jr., was born in 1940 and their second child, Nora, in 1951. In the mid-forties, she published her first book of poems, "A Street in Bronzeville," and from then she continued putting out literary work of superb academic quality for the next five and a half decades. [Gwendolyn Brooks] lived a very simple and unpretentious, almost Spartan, lifestyle. Her outward appearance did not exude brilliance or portray her extraordinary, literary skills. Even when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her second selection of poems, her life did not change in any remarkable way except that she became more immersed in her work. So enlivening were her works that some have said that her writings appear to jump out the books and "struck my hands like to a thunderbolt. These poems seem to possess muscle and sinew that weren't afraid to take the lan-guage and revamp it, twist it and energize it, so that it shimmied and dashed and lingered."
She did not like the term "African American." In an interview in 1994, Brooks stated that she preferred the term B-L-A-CK instead of African American when referring to Black people, and she also believed that "Black" should be capitalized when referring to Black people. She said, "The Black spirit fought so painfully to get 'colored' and 'negro' capitalized and 'Black' capitalized. Newspapers and magazines, in referring to Black people as Blacks still refuse to honor the notion of respectable and respected identity, and insist on spelling Blacks with a little 'b.'"See the full content of this document
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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks is an acclaimed poet and one of the most prolific and gifted writers of the 20th century. In 1950, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize-the first Black woman-to be so honored for her poetry. She has helped to inspire a generati...
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