Gwendolyn Brooks wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. She was known around the world for using poetry to increase understanding of black culture in America.
During the 1940’s and the 1950’s, Gwendolyn Brooks used her poems to describe conditions among the poor, racial (种族的) inequality and drug use in the black community. She also wrote poems about the struggles of black women.
But her skill was more than her ability to write about struggling black people. She combined traditional European poetry styles with the African American experience.
Gwendolyn Brooks once said that she wrote about what she saw and heard in the street. She said she found most of her materials through looking out of the window of her second-floor apartment in Chicago, Illinois.
In her early poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the South Side of Chicago, where many black people live. In her poems, the South Side is called Bronzeville. It was “A Street in Bronzeville” that gained the attention of literary experts in 1945. Critics praised her poetic skills and her powerful descriptions about the black experience during the time. The Bronzeville poems were her first published collection.
In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. She won the prize for her second book of poems called “Annie Allen”. “Annie Allen” is a collection of poetry about a Bronzeville girl as a daughter, a wife and a mother. She experiences loneliness, loss, death and poverty (贫穷).
Gwendolyn Brooks said that winning the prize changed her life.
Her next work was a novel written in 1953 called “Maud Martha”. “Maud Martha” attracted little attention when it was first published. But now it is considered an important work by some critics. Its main ideas about the difficult lives of many women are popular among female writers today.
小题1:Gwendolyn Brooks became world-famous because .
A．she was an expert on the language of poetry
B．she introduced black culture by writing poems
C．she fought for black rights by writing poems
D．her poems showed the lives of black women小题2:Which of the following can we learn from the text?
A．Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems focused on black people in Africa.
B．Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature was important to Brooks.
C．Gwendolyn Brooks used to suffer a lot from drugs.
D．Gwendolyn Brooks was very strict with herself.小题3:How did Gwendolyn Brooks get ideas for most of her poems?
A．By observing life.
B．By having talks.
C．By reading widely.
D．By traveling.小题4:We can infer that the book “Annie Allen” mainly deals with .
A．family life
B．inequality
C．adventure
D．failure
