Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was a highly regarded poet with the distinction of being the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was born on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, KS -- and died December 3, 2000. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

The Poetry Foundation's bio quotes George E. Kent of The Dictionary of Literary Biography as saying Brooks' body of work gave her:

"a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young black militant writers of the 1960s."

a song in the front yard
Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Primer For Blacks
Gwendolyn Brooks

  

Blackness

is a title,

is a preoccupation,

is a commitment Blacks

are to comprehend—

and in which you are

to perceive your Glory.

The conscious shout

of all that is white is

“It’s Great to be white.”

The conscious shout

of the slack in Black is

"It's Great to be white."

Thus all that is white

has white strength and yours.

The word Black

has geographic power,

pulls everybody in:

Blacks here—

Blacks there—

Blacks wherever they may be.

And remember, you Blacks, what they told you—

remember your Education:

“one Drop—one Drop

maketh a brand new Black.”

         Oh mighty Drop.

______And because they have given us kindly

so many more of our people

Blackness

stretches over the land.

Blackness—

the Black of it,

the rust-red of it,

the milk and cream of it,

the tan and yellow-tan of it,

the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it,

the “olive” and ochre of it—

Blackness

marches on.

The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride

is to Comprehend,

to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black,

which is our “ultimate Reality,”

which is the lone ground

from which our meaningful metamorphosis,

from which our prosperous staccato,

group or individual, can rise.

Self-shriveled Blacks.

Begin with gaunt and marvelous concession:

YOU are our costume and our fundamental bone.

      

      All of you—

      you COLORED ones,

      you NEGRO ones,

those of you who proudly cry

      “I’m half INDian”—

      those of you who proudly screech

      “I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY veins”

      ALL of you—

            you proper Blacks,

      you half-Blacks,

      you wish-I-weren’t Blacks,

      Niggeroes and Niggerenes.

      You.

_______________________________

To Be In Love

by Gwendolyn Brooks

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on March 1, 1914.

1914 - 1994

Ralph Ellison's single published novel, Invisible Man (1952), is recognized as one of the finest achievements in modern American fiction as well as one of the most complete statements of the African American experience.




Library of Congress Bio
http://www.read.gov/fiction/ellison.html



Born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, the grandson of slaves, Ralph Waldo Ellison and his younger brother were raised by their mother, whose husband died when Ralph was 3 years old. His mother supported her young family by working as a nursemaid, a janitor and a domestic.

From an early age Ellison loved music and expected to be a musician and a composer. He played his first instrument - a cornet - at age 8. By 19, he had enrolled at Tuskegee Institute as a music major, playing the trumpet. Although drawn to jazz and jazz musicians, Ellison studied classical music and the symphonic form because he was looking forward to a career as a composer and performer of classical music.

In the summer of 1936, Ellison went to New York City to earn expenses for his senior year at Tuskegee. It was a fateful decision: He never returned to his studies at Tuskegee and never became a professional musician. While in New York, Ellison met the writer Richard Wright. When they first became acquainted, Ellison had every intention of returning to Tuskegee. But the Great Depression prevented him from earning the needed funds.

Eventually he got a job doing research and writing for the New York Federal Writers Program, an offshoot of the Works Progress Administration. He also began writing essays and short stories for the “New Masses,” “The Negro Quarterly,” “The New Republic,” “Saturday Review” and other publications.

With the outbreak of World War II, Ellison joined the U.S. Merchant Marine as a cook, saw action in the North Atlantic and began to think of writing a major novel. However, not until after the war did he begin writing what was to become Invisible Man.

From the time Invisible Man first appeared in 1952, it was a popular and critical success. On the best-seller list for 16 weeks, in 1953 the novel won the National Book Award. And more than 40 years later, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow declared, “This book holds its own among the best novels of the century.”

Invisible Man established Ellison as a serious and important literary figure, and he spent the next two years (1955-57) in Rome as a Fellow of the American Academy. He returned to the United States to teach at a variety of colleges and universities including Bard College, the University of Chicago, Rutgers, Yale and New York University, among others.

He always maintained his wide range of interests - from music, both classical and jazz, to sports, theater and photography - and in 1964 he published “Shadow and Act,” a collection of essays on these and other subjects. Ellison has described the volume as an attempt "to relate myself to American life through literature.“Going to the Territory,” a subsequent collection of essays, lectures and criticism, appeared in 1986. For many years, Ellison worked on a second, long piece of fiction, which he never completed; it finally appeared after his death in 1994, as Juneteenth.

After a short-lived first marriage, Ellison married Fanny McConnell in 1946. A devoted couple, they lived together in an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City until Ellison died in April 1994. There were no children. Fanny McConnell Ellison died in 2005 at the age of 93.

Ralph Ellison first spoke at the Library of Congress in 1964 when he delivered the Gertrude Clark Whittall Lecture; from 1966 to 1972, he served as the Library's Honorary Consultant in American Letters.

For many years, Ellison worked on a second, long piece of fiction, which he never completed; it finally appeared after his death in 1994 as Juneteenth.

A Selected Bibliography of the Work of Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man (1952)
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995)
Flying Home and Other Stories (1997)
Juneteenth (1999)

Invisible Man

View
Ralph Ellison Introduction

Open

Invisible Man PowerPoint

View
Invisible Metaphors

 

Toni Morrison

In a March 1990 Bill Moyers interview with Toni Morrison - for the television series, A World of Ideas - Morrison explored the concept: "Master Narrative."







Moyers: I don’t think I’ve ever met a more pathetic character in modern literature than Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye.

Morrison: She has surrendered completely to the so-called “Master Narrative,” the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness. She got it from her family; she got it from school; she got it from the movies; she got it from everywhere.

Moyers: The Master Narrative . . . what is . . . that’s life.

Morrison: No. It’s white male life. The Master Narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else: The Master Fiction . . . history. It has a certain point of view. So when those little girls see that the most prized gift they can receive at Christmas time is this little white doll, that’s the Master Narrative speaking: this is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it, so what are you going to do about it? So if you surrender to that, as Pecola did (the little girl, the “I” of the story, is a bridge: [she] is resistant, feisty, doesn’t trust any adults) . . . [Pecola] is so completely needful; she has so little and needs so much . . . she becomes the perfect victim–the total pathetic one. And for her, there’s no way back into the community or society. For her, an abused child, she can only escape into fantasy, into madness . . . which is part of what . . . the mind is always creative . . . it can think that up.

 

Toni Morrison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ9vd0lLW2g&feature=share&list=PL5hmbrDt2_Texx5uS960uvHjNI9ZF2Ogp

Shirley Temple

Imitation of Life (1934)

Open

The Bluest Eye PowerPoint

.

IB Examination Prep Material

.

Langston Hughes

 
“We possess within ourselves a great 
reservoir of physical and spiritual strength.”


“There is no lack within the Negro people 
of beauty, strength and power.” 

Open PowerPoint

• 1902–1967
• Born in Joplin, Missouri - February 1, 1902
• Raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas.
• Poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, song lyricist, radio writer, translator, author of juvenile books, and lecturer. In early years worked as assistant cook, launderer, busboy, and at other odd jobs; worked as seaman on voyages to Africa and Europe. Lived at various times in Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union.

James Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance."  His first published poem was – The Negro Speaks of Rivers. During The Great Depression, Hughes became involved in radical politics, eventually joining the American Communist Party. The work of Langston Hughes was influenced and shaped by the joys, struggles and triumphs of poor African American families. In the writer's own words, his poetry is about . . .

"workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago – people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter – and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

Harlem

by Langston Hughes   


What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I, Too, Sing America

by Langston Hughes   


I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

I, Too, Sing America

  by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15615#sthash.F2k1BVuV.dpuf

The Great Gatsby

Link to Gatsby PowerPoint

.

Maya Angelou

Link to Maya Angelou PowerPoint