A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "Primer for Blacks"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "Primer for Blacks," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535831369

Book preview

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Primer for Blacks

Gwendolyn Brooks

1980

Introduction

Gwendolyn Brooks had a very long career. Her first poem appeared in a magazine when she was only thirteen years old. Her first poetry collection was released in 1945, and her last book was published soon after her death at age eighty-three in 2000. In the early part of her career, Brooks had an outstanding amount of success. She earned great critical acclaim in the established, mainstream literary world, including winning the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; she was the first African American woman to do so. Brooks's growing political awareness throughout the 1960s and 1970s caused her to completely change her writing style, risking the loss of that success—she went from composing introspective poems in traditional forms to writing free verse centering on more controversial subjects. Primer for Blacks, written after this great shift in her style as a poet, was published in 1980.

Author Biography

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917. When she was one month old, the family moved to Chicago, where Brooks lived for the rest of her life. Her father, David, was a janitor who always wished to be a doctor. Her mother, Keziah, was a teacher and a talented pianist. Brooks's brother, Raymond, was born in 1918, and the siblings were always very close. Brooks's parents encouraged her interest in reading and writing. Her first poem, Eventide, was published in the magazine American Childhood when she was only thirteen. By the time Brooks was seventeen, her poems were appearing regularly in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper popular with Chicago's black community.

Brooks attended several Chicago high schools: a mostly white school, an all-black school, and an integrated school. This experience gave her a firsthand impression of race relations of the time. In 1936, Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College