Features

The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley has acquired personal papers of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. 

Included in the collection are manuscripts of poems and speeches, family photos, awards, journals and 50 year's worth of her correspondence with her publishers. 

Brooks, who died in December at the age of 83, gave her blessing to the university's acquisition of her papers. In 1997, she read at the university's Wheeler Auditorium. At that time, more than 700 people were turned away, and Brooks signed books until midnight.  

The granddaughter of a slave, Brooks appeared on the literary scene in the post-Harlem Renaissance period. Her poetry promoted an understanding of African American culture, and although it explored issues of racism and poverty, those issues did not limit her poetry, says former poet laureate and Berkeley professor Robert Hass. 

``If any one American writer naturalized the facts of black life, looked at it as lives people led, lives that happened to be inescapably caught in a racialized world but not absolutely defined  

by that fact, it was she,'' he said. ``This curiosity, this art without a social agenda, was a kind of declaration of independence.'' 

According to Berkeley professor Susan Schweik, Brooks used traditional forms for radical, innovative ends, and mentored black and women poets, and pioneered writing of race and gender issues. 

Her poem ``The Mother'' is believed to be the first poem written in the United States to talk about abortion. She read that poem at a gathering of American poets honored at the White House in 1980 by then-President Jimmy Carter. 

Brooks was prolific, and her writing includes children's books, an autobiography, one novel, a collection of poetry about South Africa and other volumes of poetry, including ``We Real Cool,''  

which was published in 1966. 

Brooks, who is said to have started her writing career as a child by sending poems to her local community newspaper to surprise her parents, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her second book of poetry, ``Annie Allen.'' That book was a series of poems about a girl growing up in Chicago. 

The Berkeley collection, which was retrieved from one of Brook's homes in the South Side of Chicago, is made up of 22 boxes of uncatalogued material from the 1930s to 1980. 

The materials will add to the Bancroft Library's African American writers collection, which was launched in 1978 and provides access to thousands of books, manuscripts, correspondence  

and other rare works by black authors.