capped by a completely satisfying date with a soft,
willing woman.
Annie Allen (1949) renders the story of an or-
dinary black woman in four parts: “Notes from
the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad,”
“Appendix to the Anniad,” and “The Woman-
hood.” Set in Chicago, the centerpiece of the col-
lection, “The Anniad,” is a mock epic that alludes
to Homer’s The Iliad and Virgil’s The Aeneid.
Through Annie’s urban black female conscious-
ness, Brooks takes the reader from Annie’s early
life through the disillusionment of marriage and
other life experiences. Annie’s search for self and
for romantic love unfolds in the form of a ballad
of desire and experience that culminates a lesson
of self-esteem and self-reliance in the final section,
“The Womanhood.” The mock epic and, indeed,
the entire collection cover many of the same con-
cerns that Brooks later tackles in her only novel,
Maud Martha.
Maud Martha deals with the developing con-
sciousness of a young girl living in a northern city
during the period before, during, and after World
War II. Composed of 34 very poetic sketches, the
novel provides an application of double-conscious-
ness, which Brooks expands by presenting a title
character and protagonist who must overcome her
feelings of rejection in a world that values white-
ness (light skin), maleness, European features, and
“good hair” over blackness (dark skin), femaleness,
African features, and coarse hair. In effect, Maud
experiences and exhibits “multiple consciousness.”
In some ways Maud Martha is akin to the realism
of ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s classic THEIR EYES WERE
WATCHING GOD (1937) in its focus on a woman’s
journey of self-discovery and her growing aware-
ness of her own agency.
Brooks’s literary career took a decided turn after
she attended a Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk
University in 1967 and interacted with a number
of artists involved with the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT.
She credits these younger artists with helping her
gain greater awareness about American society
and about herself. In the 1970s she became a con-
sultant in American literature for the Library of
Congress and was named poet laureate of Illinois.
Brooks taught in a number of colleges and univer-
sities, including Chicago’s Columbia College, the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, and City Uni-
versity of New York. Her career as author, teacher,
and community activist spanned almost 70 years.
She died on December 3, 2000.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bloom, Harold, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks. Philadelphia:
Chelsea House, 2000.
Bolden, Barbara Jean. Urban Rage in Bronzeville:
Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn
Brooks, 1945–1960. Chicago: Third World Press,
1999.
Bryant, Jacqueline, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud
Martha: A Critical Collection. Chicago: Third
World Press, 2002.
Gayles, Gloria Wade. Conversations with Gwendolyn
Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2003.
Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexing-
ton: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and Heroic
Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1987.
Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Dis-
tilled: Gwendolyn Brooks: Her Poetry and Fiction.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks:
Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1996.
Lovalerie KingBrothers and Keepers
John Edgar Wideman (1984)
Following the arrest of his brother, Robby, for
murder, novelist JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN began tak-
ing a new direction with his literary career. Seeking
to understand the reasons behind his brother’s de-
scent into a life of crime and eventually life impris-
onment, Wideman explored the intersections of
family, race, and history in America. The result was
the autobiographical account of his own journey
and Robby’s incarceration in Brothers and Keepers.
Wideman had drawn a fictional account of some
of these events in the short story cycle Damballah74 Brothers and Keepers