In 1935, the WPA Federal Writers’ Project began, and Chicago was a hive of subsidized artistic activity that often dovetailed with progressive interracial (if problematically so) political movements. The South represented the beauty of home ways, but it was also the economically, spiritually, and physically violent home of white supremacy. For many of the Chicago characters in Brooks’s poems, as well as its real-life residents, the rural South was close at hand in memory and ways even as people navigated the rough and ready wind-whipped city.

In 1936, Harlem was the only neighborhood in the United States with a larger black population than Chicago’s South Side. Black Southern migrants from the second wave of the Great Migration flocked to the city in large numbers. The Chicago of Brooks’s formative years bustled with creative and political energy. Her mother would tell her that she was going to be “the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” The family moved to Chicago shortly after Brooks’s birth, and she would spend the rest of her life on that city’s South Side-a great “Negro metropolis”-through years when the innovation, strength, struggle, and vision of its black residents gave her a backdrop and context for all that would interest her in her work. Her mother was a teacher before her marriage and then turned her full attention to homemaking, attending fiercely to the creative talent of young Gwendolyn from an early age. Her father aspired to be a doctor and studied medicine for a year and a half at Fisk, but ended up working as a janitor.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Her career as a whole also offers an example of an artist who was willing to respond and evolve in the face of the dramatic historical, political, and aesthetic changes and challenges she lived through. Brooks is a consummate portraitist who found worlds in the community she wrote out of, and her innovations as a sonneteer remain an inspiration to more than one generation of poets who have come after her. Her poems distill the very best aspects of Modernist style with the sounds and shapes of various African-American forms and idioms. Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago’s great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century.

Gwendolyn brooks about racism