The literary career of Gwendolyn Brooks, who died on December 3rd aged 83, was distinguished enough to be coveted by any writer. It is also self evident that, being black and a woman, she achieved more than her fair share of "firsts" in a vocation that spanned eight decades. The first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950) and to be appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976), she became poet laureate of Illinois in 1968.
She was born in her grandmother's home of Topeka, Kansas, the first child of David Brooks - son of a runaway slave - and Keziah Brooks. At the age of one month she was taken by her parents to live in Chicago, where she remained for the rest of her life.
A shy, bookish child, she developed an early passion for poetry and in 1930 her first published verse appeared in American Childhood magazine. By the age of 17 she was submitting work to the weekly poetry column of the Chicago Defender.
Graduating from college during the Depression, she did secretarial work, then in 1939 married Henry Blakely, also an aspiring writer. They divorced in 1969 but were reunited four years later. Her first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), depicted everyday black life on Chicago's South Side, peopled with memorable characters. In 1946, she won a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as a $1,000 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
It was for her second collection, Annie Allen (1949), that she was awarded the Pulitzer. A sequence of poems about a black girl growing up in Chicago, it won particular praise for her innovation in poetic technique, the sonnet-ballad. A poetic oeuvre grew to include more than a dozen books, including Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963) and In the Mecca (1968), nominated for a National Book Award.
Her reputation as a poet somewhat overshadowed her only novel, Maud Martha (1953), which is in many ways a significant precursor of more recent fiction by African-American women. Written with an affecting precision that details the process by which the young woman protagonist gradually matures, Gwendolyn Brooks acknowledged its similarities to the trajectory, if not the specifics, of her own life: "There's fact-meat in the soup, among the chunks of fancy."
More specific autobiography was included in her 1972 book, Report From Part One, in which she writes: "Are you aware of a fact-that-should-be startling about the High Days of my youth? All were Europe-rooted or America-rooted. Not one celebration in my black household or in any black household that I knew featured any black glory or greatness or grandeur. A capricious bunch of entries and responses has brought me to my present understanding of fertile facts.
"Know-nows: I know now that I am essentially an essential African, in occupancy here because of an indeed `peculiar' institution. I know that the black emphasis must be, not against white, but FOR black."
Though she had become an established and respected talent after starting out as a "literary integrationist", Gwendolyn Brooks might have been marginalised by more strident black writings of the civil rights era, had she not been open to change and development in herself.
She was clear about the moment that she rediscovered awareness of her blackness: it was in 1967 at a Fisk University writers' conference addressed by an angry LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Thereafter she was increasingly concerned with accessibility: "My aim, in the next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully `call' all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones; not always to `teach' - I shall wish often to entertain, to illumine."
Her increasing concern for accessibility and affordable pricing led her to move publishers, to small local presses such as the black imprint Broadside Press - with whom she published the Riot (1969 and Family Pictures (1970). She also established her own outlet, the David Company (named for her father). She also produced many works of nonfiction, works for children, essays and reviews. Her idealism was untarnished by age and she was almost 80 when Report From Part Two appeared in 1995.
Her commitment remained steadfast: "I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it" - yet her tone was gently insistent rather than dogmatic. Typically, she wrote in Corners of the Curving Sky:
Our earth is round, and, among other things
That means that you and I can hold
Completely different Points of view and both be right.
The difference of our positions will show
Stars in your window I cannot even imagine.
Your sky may burn with light,
While mine, at the same moment,
Spreads beautiful to darkness.
Still, we must choose how we separately corner
The circling universe of our experience.
Once chosen, our cornering will determine
The message of any star and darkness we encounter.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks: born 1917; died, December 2000