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Gwendolyn Brooks grew up in a racist time period; encouraging her writings to be about the life of a black during this time period. She grew up during one of the hardest time periods known as the Great Depression. Brooks was known for her writing poetry about racism and life of being a black American; she was often criticized for her works but also honored for showing encouragement and hope in her writings.
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917. She grew up in a harsh, racist time period along with The Great Depression. Brooks’ poems were influenced from this and encouraged her to write many poems about the life of a black American. “She was inspired by the black power movement and the militancy of such poets as Amiri Baraka” (Barker, 448). During the 1960s her writing underwent a racial change in style and subject matter. Brooks learned to write such great poems at the Associate of Literature and Art, Wilson Junior College, 1936. Writing many known poems such as: A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, Maud Martha, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, The Bean Eaters, etc. She’s a poet of contemporary writings; her poems mirror the ups and the downs of black American lives at this time. Although she writes with great encouragement and wisdom, she looks at everything with an open mind. Her characters speak for themselves. “Her works sometimes resembled a poignant social document, but her poems are works of art…” (Miller, 78). One can picture a vivid idea of Bronzeville, U.S.A. because of the great details she puts into her poems. A black district in her native Chicago, that serves as the setting for many of her poems. “Her characters are usually the unheroic black people who fled the land for the city- only to d...
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...try Magazine), 1949; Robert F. Fergusin Memorial Award (Friends of Literature) for selected poems, 1964; Anisfield- Wolf Award for In The Mecca, 1968; Poet Laureate of Illinois, 1969; and Shelley Memorial Award, 1976” (Israel, Page 100). She was given many awards for her poems. Her poems were awarded for being encouraging, hopeful, and the true life of a black American.
Gwendolyn brooks is a known author for the unique poems she wrote. The encouraging words she wrote about in the poems and the great details she put in them. Her poems were works of art and she was honored for that with many awards. Not many people can criticize her work, only good opinions about it. Brooks was known for her writing poetry about racism and life of being a black American; she was often criticized for her works but also honored for showing encouragement and hope in her writings.
“A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.” This quote from actress and women’s rights inspiration and icon, Louise Brooks, accurately describes her life. The quote means being independent and relying on your own ability is what will get you ahead in life. This is how Brooks lived her seventy nine year life. She is best known for her many films in Hollywood. Between the years 1925 and 1938 she was in twenty four films. Not only was she a Hollywood actress, she was also a dancer and a Broadway performer. But, Louise Brooks is also known for other things beside her performing. Louise Brooks was the most influential person of all on
The poem Sadie and Maud was written by Gwendolyn Brooks and is included in her first volume of poetry known as A Street in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1917, but moved to Chicago at a young age. Her first poem was published when she was thirteen years old, and it was called Eventide. By the time Gwendolyn was seventeen, she was publishing poems for the Chicago Defender, a newspaper for the black population. After attending junior college, Gwendolyn began writing the poems that were included in her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville”, which was published in 1945. These poems focused on portraying the black urban poor. In the 1940s, when these
The award-winning book of poems, Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, is an eye-opening story. Told in first person with memories from the author’s own life, it depicts the differences between South Carolina and New York City in the 1960s as understood by a child. The book begins in Ohio, but soon progresses to South Carolina where the author spends a considerable amount of her childhood. She and her older siblings, Hope and Odella (Dell), spend much of their pupilage with their grandparents and absorb the southern way of life before their mother (and new baby brother) whisk them away to New York, where there were more opportunities for people of color in the ‘60s. The conflict here is really more of an internal one, where Jacqueline struggles with the fact that it’s dangerous to be a part of the change, but she can’t subdue the fact that she wants to. She also wrestles with the issue of where she belongs, “The city is settling around me….(but) my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I’ve ever known” (Woodson 184). The conflict is never explicitly resolved, but the author makes it clear towards the end
“Silence is a sounding thing, to one who listens hungrily.” Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an author, journalist, educator, and artists. She was a woman of the Harlem Renaissance. But despite all the struggles of being an African American woman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett made herself into the woman she was in the 1900s. Therefore, the strong woman she became is shown through her work.
One of the great things about Composition and Literature is that the readings can relate to many other topics outside of the class. The poems and the stories read in this class give a more in depth look at a specific subject and give a clearer picture of what life was like and how people lived at that time. In most classes about U.S. History, the sections taught on segregation don’t give specific examples of how people were treated or the perspectives of the people who were mistreated. However, reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry in the Composition and Literature course gives students an opportunity to learn greater details about segregation through the perspectives of the people most affected by it and the
Lucille Clifton’s experiences as an African-American living in a town inhabited by mostly Caucasians affected her decisions and goals in life. Growing up in a world filled with racism and gender discrimination, Clifton challenged and overcame stereotypes about both blacks and women. Despite her early struggles, Clifton writes about her problems as she endeavors living to the fullest extent. As a child, Clifton remained thankful for her parents “gifts of poetry and storytelling” (Lupton 18). These experiences as an African-American living in an impoverished environment along with a lasting love for her community and family helped Clifton grow as a person and poet. Therefore, she gained popularity for portraying African-American youth and family life in her works. Overcoming all of her struggles was most likely the hardest thing to accomplish, and reflecting on them through poetry came naturally.
In “Queens, 1963”, the speaker narrates to her audience her observations that she has collected from living in her neighborhood located in Queens, New York in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The narrator is a thirteen-year-old female immigrant who moved from the Dominican Republic to America with her family. As she reflects on her past year of living in America, she reveals a superb understanding of the reasons why the people in her neighborhood act the way they do towards other neighbors. In “Queens, 1963” by Julia Alvarez, the poet utilizes diction, figurative language, and irony to effectively display to the readers that segregation is a strong part of the American melting pot.
...t social injustices (Weidt 53). Because of her quest for freedom, she gave way to writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Countee Cullen. Countee Cullen wrote "Heritage," which mixes themes of freedom, Africa, and religion. It can be said, then, that he gave way to writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote "Negro Hero," which is about the status of the African American during the 1940s. Clearly, these poets followed the first steps taken by Phillis Wheatley towards speaking out against social issues, and today's poetry is a result of the continuation to speak out against them
Smith’s poems, she writes about controversial topics such as racism, liberalism, and sexism. Racism is in America throughout its history has been seen as the prejudice of privileged White men directed against other races and, in particular, AfricanAmericans. Despite many advances in race relations during the latter part of the twentieth century, the mainstream media today continues to perpetuate that idea that conservative White Americans discriminate against AfricanAmericans with the same vehemence observed in our earlier history. In a similar fashion, much of the poetry written by Tracy K. Smith antagonizes AfricanAmericans
She is an artist best known for her amazing quilts. Her artwork we see today was influenced by the people and music around her during her childhood. There was also racism, sexism, and segregation she had to deal with daily. In 1950, she enrolled in the city college of New York, pressured by her parents. She was intended to major in art but during the time because art was a male predominate profession, she was forced to major in art education.
Sonia Sanchez, a woman known for her unimaginable talents in the art of writing poetry and her involvement in the Black Arts Movement. She has won a numerous amount of awards which celebrate black excellence. Throughout her career she has been notably mentioned with a multitudinous amount of other extraordinary African American poets. She has traveled the world sharing her purpose for literature with thousands of people. A majority of the literature that she has written adhered to the life of black Americans. Although she has achieved many accomplishments one question may remain in the minds of enthusiasts of African American Literature. Does Sonia Sanchez’s voluminous amount of literature encourage African American advancement?
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Her mother was a teacher and her father, the son of a runaway slave, was a janitor. As an African American family in the 1900s, life was more difficult for them than it was for many of their white counterparts. For instance, throughout her education, Gwendolyn was often teased and bullied by her white and light-skinned classmates for the deepness of her skin tone. Gwendolyn was a shy, quieted girl, and she often channeled her feelings through poetry, giving her a talent for words at a young age. This talent did not go unnoticed by her mother, and she arranged for Gwendolyn to meet Langston Hughes in 1936. Inspired by meeting such an extraordinary man, Gwendolyn went to college and then published her first poetry book, titled A Street in Bronzeville. After this, poetry became a primary part of Gwendolyn’s life, and allowed her talk about public issues through metaphors and imagery. Gwendolyn’s poems mostly focused on bringing awareness to the black community and the discrimination they faced on a daily basis, but they also reached out to other minority groups. Gwendolyn not only had to face the challenges of being black in the 1940s, but also had to overcome the difficulties of being a woman in this time period. However, Brooks overcame the adversity by publishing numbers of poetry collections, and eventually, in 1950, becoming the first African American to win the
Gloria Naylor, a celebrated African-American novelist, was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. She has authored six novels, namely The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2005). Her fiction depicts how black men and women struggle to survive and succeed in the oppressive world of racism. Her fictional world generally contains portions of her own life and looks more convincing as she is the part of what she writes “that outline did not say that black was beautiful, it did not say that black was ugly. It said simply: You are. You exist. It reverberated enough to give me courage to pick up the pen. And it’s what finally validated me” (Naylor 171). With a great confidence and authority she writes about the places and the people she is well acquainted with. Naylor’s fictional world is singularly a world of black community, and she selects her characters from its all layers--working to upper class one, and urban North to rural South. The uniqueness of her characters is that they are individuals, capable of controlling, to a certain extent, their own destinies. Her novels bear the literary influence of the
Gwendolyn Brook’s “Ballad of Pearl May Lee” came from her book called Street in Bronzeville. This book exemplifies Brook’s “dual place in American literature” (Smith, 2). It is associated with Modernist poetry, as well as the Harlem Renaissance. This book is known for its theme of victimizing the poor, black woman. “Ballad of Pearl May Lee” is a poem that uses tone to represent the complex mood of the ballad. While tone and mood are often used interchangeably, there are differences even though they often work together in a poem. A poem’s mood refers to the atmosphere or state of mind that the poem takes on. This is often conveyed through the tone, which is the style or manner of expression through writing. In this poem, Brooks uses tone to enhance the mood. This paper will shed light on the idea that the mood of the poem is affected by the tone in several ways in order to make the mood inconsistent. Some of the ways that tone does this is by several episodic shifts in the scene of the poem, the repetition of stanzas at the end of the poem, the use of diction, and the change in the speaker’s stance throughout the poem. These poetic techniques enhance the speaker’s current feeling of self-pity and revengeful satisfaction by her mixed emotions associated with this reflection.