Though born in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Brooks lived all but one month of her life in Chicago and it is the City of Big Shoulders that informed almost all of her five decades of writing. Brooks’ biographer George Kent observed, “Gwendolyn Brooks shared with Langston Hughes the achievement of being responsive to turbulent changes in the black community’s vision of itself and to the changing forms of its vibrations during decades of rapid change” in the twentieth century. Ms. Brooks, in exquisite verse and generous candor, has recorded how Chicago has evolved, and the particular vibrations felt in the black community.

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