The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks is considered a major poet of the twentieth century. She is known for her sensitive representations of black urban life and for combining African American vernacular speech with the poetic conventions of traditional verse.

Biographical Information

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, to Keziah Wims Brooks, a schoolteacher, and David Anderson Brooks, a janitor who had once hoped to become a doctor. She was raised on Chicago's South Side where, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in her school, her home life was stable and loving. Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents, and she published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. Her early work was influenced by Emily Dickinson, William Cullen Bryant, and the English Romantic poets—William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley...