Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen, becoming the first Black person to receive a Pulitzer Prize. The book follows Annie, a Black girl in Chicago, through childhood, marriage and motherhood, using poetry to trace the shape of an ordinary life.

Gwendolyn Brooks / The Pulitzer Prizes / Library of Congress

LiteratureHistory

The story behind the card

Brooks grew up in Bronzeville, on Chicago's South Side, and was 32 when she won. She was Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death in 2000, and in 1985–86 she served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the post now called Poet Laureate of the United States. A 1967 Black writers' conference at Fisk University in Nashville brought her into contact with younger poets of the Black Arts Movement, which wanted art made by and for Black communities. She then moved from the mainstream publisher Harper to Black-owned presses such as Broadside Press, and ran writing workshops for members of a Chicago gang, the Blackstone Rangers.

Türkçe oku
Gwendolyn Brooks, 1950'de Annie Allen adlı kitabıyla Pulitzer Şiir Ödülü'nü kazandı ve Pulitzer alan ilk Siyah oldu. Kitap, Chicago'da büyüyen Siyah bir kız olan Annie'nin çocukluğunu, evliliğini ve anneliğini şiirle anlatarak sıradan bir hayatın izini sürer.

Chicago'nun güneyindeki Bronzeville semtinde büyüyen Brooks, ödülü kazandığında 32 yaşındaydı. 1968'den 2000'deki ölümüne kadar Illinois eyaletinin resmî şairi (Poet Laureate) oldu; 1985-86'da da bugün ABD'nin resmî şairliği olarak bilinen Kongre Kütüphanesi şiir danışmanlığını üstlendi. 1967'de Nashville'deki Fisk Üniversitesi'nde yapılan bir Siyah yazarlar toplantısında, Siyah toplulukların kendi sanatını savunan Kara Sanatlar Hareketi'nin genç şairleriyle tanıştı. Bundan sonra büyük yayınevi Harper'dan ayrılıp Broadside Press gibi Siyahların sahip olduğu yayınevleriyle çalıştı; Chicago'daki Blackstone Rangers çetesinin üyelerine yazı atölyeleri düzenledi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Gwendolyn Brooks
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Much of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.

Parchment and papyrus decay, so an ancient text survived only if someone kept making fresh copies. In the 9th and 10th centuries Byzantine scribes adopted a smaller, joined-up handwriting called minuscule and recopied the classics in it. Few of the older manuscripts were kept, so for many ancient authors the oldest surviving copy dates from this period. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, summarised 279 books he had read; almost half are now lost, so for many of them his notes are our main record. His pupil Arethas, later archbishop of Caesarea, today's Kayseri, had manuscripts copied that preserve works by Plato and Marcus Aurelius; his Plato is now in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The 10th-century Suda, an encyclopaedia of some 30,000 entries, also quotes many lost sources. This revival of learning is known as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the ruling dynasty.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree three times: in hieroglyphs, in Demotic, an everyday Egyptian script, and in ancient Greek. Scholars could still read Greek, so they could compare it with the Egyptian versions line by line. In 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion used it to crack the hieroglyphic script.

Hieroglyphs had been unreadable for more than 1,400 years: the last known inscription was carved in AD 394, and later scholars wrongly assumed that every sign stood for an idea. The breakthrough came through names. Royal names are written inside oval frames called cartouches, and from 1814 the English scientist Thomas Young matched the cartouche on the stone with the Greek name Ptolemy and worked out some of its sounds. Champollion knew Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, still used in the Coptic Church. In September 1822, in a letter to the secretary of the French Academy of Inscriptions, he announced that many hieroglyphs stood for sounds, and by 1824 he had shown that the script combines signs for sounds with signs for meanings. Over the following decades, texts from more than 3,000 years of Egyptian history became readable again.

British MuseumRead card
WonderLiterature

Shakespeare's plays are the earliest known written source for many English words and phrases, from “star-crossed” to “green-eyed monster”. But being first found in Shakespeare is not the same as being invented by him, and many such words turn out to have been used by others first.

The popular figure of about 1,700 words invented by Shakespeare rests largely on the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition cited him as the earliest user of many words. The scholar Jonathan Hope has pointed out why: the Victorian readers who collected quotations for the dictionary read Shakespeare more thoroughly than any other writer, so he often got the credit for words that can also be found in others. Later research, helped by searchable collections of early printed books, has found older examples of many of them. What remains is still remarkable. He turned nouns into verbs, added prefixes and suffixes freely and joined words in new ways, and dozens of his phrases, such as “salad days” and “sea change”, are still in everyday use more than four hundred years later.

Literary historyRead card
WonderLiterature

The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early 1000s by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, is often called the world's first novel. Its 54 chapters follow the life and loves of Genji, an emperor's son, and then the generation after him.

Murasaki Shikibu is not her real name, which is unknown. She served Empress Shōshi in Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto, and wrote the tale between about 1000 and 1012, probably in instalments passed around among the women of the court. She wrote mostly in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic script, because Chinese, the language of government and prestige, was then considered men's business. Her own manuscript is lost; the tale survives in some 300 later copies that differ from one another, and the oldest illustrated scrolls date from the 12th century. Whether it is the “first” novel depends on the definition, since Greek and Roman prose stories are older, but its large cast, inner lives and characters who grow old give it much of what we expect of a novel. Arthur Waley's English translation of 1925 to 1933 made it famous in the West.

Literary historyRead card
WonderLiterature

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was 18, after a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley by Lake Geneva. The novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.

That summer is remembered as the Year Without a Summer: the huge eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had cooled the world, and cold rain kept the friends indoors at the Villa Diodati, which Byron had rented. After an evening of reading German ghost stories, Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary struggled for days until the image of a scientist horrified by the creature he had brought to life came to her. Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre in the same contest. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first appeared in three volumes, just 500 copies, with a preface by Percy. Her name was first printed on it in a French translation of 1821 and, in Britain, in the second edition of 1823. It is often called one of the first science-fiction novels.

Literary historyRead card
Next card in the archiveLorraine Hansberry took the title of A Raisin in the Sun from Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem", which asks what happens to a dream that is put off. When the play opened in 1959, she became the first Black woman to have a play staged on Broadway. It set that question inside one Chicago family's fight for a home.Read next →