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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
At her death in 2000, Gwendolyn Brooks, along with gospel icon Mahalia Jackson and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, was recognized as the most influential figure in what came to be called Chicago’s Black Renaissance. In that movement, much as in the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the 1920s, a gathering of innovative Black writers, musicians, and visual artists asserted the integrity of the Black community by giving the Black experience a voice, an urgency directed at segregated America. Indeed, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most respected figures, poet Langston Hughes, recognized the quiet power in the poetry of a young Gwendolyn Brooks.
Two historic realities, however, shaped the emergence of Chicago’s Black Renaissance and in turn shaped the creative heart of Brooks. The first was the Great Migration, the movement north of Black families from the limited economic opportunities and racism of the Deep South. The second was the Great Depression. Brooks grew up within a grim world of limited expectations, routine sacrifice, and the hard-scrapple heroism of just getting by. Poverty, as much as race and gender, impacted her early poetry.
Brooks, like the artists in the Harlem Renaissance, perceived her role as more than using her writing to voice the Black experience.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
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A Sunset of the City
Gwendolyn Brooks
Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
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Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The Blackstone Rangers
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The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
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The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
Gwendolyn Brooks
the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
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We Real Cool
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