We Real Cool
We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks 1960
Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” first appeared in Poetry magazine in September of 1958 and was later published in her fourth volume of poetry, The Bean Eaters (1960). This short, poignant poem is perhaps Brooks’s most famous and is characterized by its use of vernacular and the way its short, staccato lines and internal rhyming pattern quickly carry the work to a crisp, startling ending. The locale of “We Real Cool” is a pool hall called The Golden Shovel. The poem’s action is recounted by the collective voice of seven pool players who, although their race is unspecified, are generally thought to be black because of their language and because the poet, herself, is African American. While “We Real Cool” could be read as a boast, the distinctive way that Brooks breaks the lines transforms egotistical display into momentary candor as the players realize the struggle of being outsiders or misfits. Neither moralizing nor maudlin, the pool players reflect on their situation but give no indication that they will change their behavior in any way. In this way, the poem is realistic and avoids a quick and easy fix. “We Real Cool” ends on an unsettling note, as the players’ predict their own fate.
Author Biography
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917. Her father, David Anderson Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, was the only child of twelve
to finish high school. He wanted to be a doctor, but after a year of college, he was forced to become a janitor at a music publishing company because of money problems. Before Gwendolyn was born, her mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, was a schoolteacher and was studying to be a concert pianist. She would, however, settle in to become a Methodist Sunday-school teacher, a wife, and mother. Mrs. Brooks encouraged her daughter to continue with the rhymes she began writing at age seven. Later, Brooks’s mother took her to see poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Hughes read the poems the teenager had brought to the reading and encouraged her to pursue her literary aspirations. By age thirteen, Brooks published her first poem in American Childhood magazine, and by the time she was twenty, several of her poems had appeared in the Chicago Defender and her work was represented in two poetry anthologies.
Graduating from junior college and unable to land a job at the Chicago Defender, Brooks took a job as a maid; later, she worked as a secretary. At age twenty-one, Brooks joined the NAACP Youth Council and there met a man named Henry Lowington Blakely II, who was also a writer. The couple married in 1939 and their first child, Henry Lowington Blakely III, was born a year later. While Brooks and her husband were living in Chicago, she attended a workshop taught by Inez Cunningham Stark. Taking Stark’s advice to avoid cliché and make every word work, Brooks won first prize in a workshop contest and the 1944 and 1945 Midwestern Writers Conference prize for poems that would be included in her first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). In 1950, her volume of poetry Annie Allen (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize, marking the first time the prize was awarded to an African American. After a productive period in which she wrote several books, Brooks attended Fisk University’s Black Writer’s Conference and was simultaneously shocked and electrified by poets such as Don L. Lee and Amiri Baraka, who proclaimed black revolt, nationhood, and power. The fruits of her awakening first appeared in In the Mecca (1968), in which she untied herself from traditional poetic forms associated with whites and counseled her readers to leap into the whirlwind of righteous black anger and action. Among Brooks’s many volumes of poems, she also published one novel, Maud Martha (1953). Brooks has been awarded more than fifty honorary doctorates, and her awards and distinctions are numerous. In 1968, she became Poet Laureate of Illinois, and, from 1985 to 1986, she served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Honored by fans, peers, and presidents, Brooks is one of America’s most distinguished writers.
Poem Text
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We 5
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Poem Summary
Subtitle
Brooks breaks the subtitle into two parts, both of which are subjects without predicates. She does not, for instance, write what would be a more economic alternative, Seven Pool Players at the Golden Shovel, even though economy is a hallmark of this poem. A possible explanation is that Brooks’s fragments allow a reading of the word “seven” as both “seven pool players” and as a lucky number. With the latter possibility, the number is ironic since, by the end of this poem, the pool players reveal that they are not lucky at all. The players are at a pool parlor called the Golden Shovel. The name initially suggests good fortune (“digging for gold”), but by the end of the poem, it implies a negative connotation as an implement used for digging graves.
Lines 1-2
The first line is the only one with “We” at the beginning and the end. Contrast this with the last line, which contains no pronoun. Perhaps with the poem’s opening, then, the pool players’ identity is at its strongest, but wanes until its weakest point— the end. “Real cool” and “left school” are more sonically dissimilar within each pair than the other paired words of the poem, such as “thin gin,” except for the last line’s “die soon.” Still, “real cool” and “left school” do link up with the use of the recurring “l” sound. “Die” and “soon,” however, have only one similarity: as is true for all of the words in the poem, they are monosyllabic. With one exception, the word “We” is enjambed, or placed at the end of the previous line with which it does not semantically belong, instead of being placed with the line it does belong with, the one that follows. The technique forces the reader to hesitate after each “We.” Brooks has remarked that the hesitation, coupled with her choice of a quiet uttering of “We,” signals a weak sense of the pool players’ identity. In fact, so weak is this identity that these pool players, while almost always thought to be black males—perhaps because the poet is black and it is boys who usually hang out in pool parlors— could be white males or even females.
Lines 3-4
Alliteration of “l” and “str” sounds mark these two lines. The words “Lurk” and “Strike” both have sinister connotations; lurking involves hiding and watching, possibly with an evil intent, while strike suggests an assault. But “Lurk” might mean little more than to hide out in the pool parlor, and “Strike straight” may refer to playing pool well or to “telling it like it is.”
Lines 5-6
To “Sing sin” probably means to proclaim sin as morally fitting or good—or at least pleasurable.
Media Adaptations
- A cassette titled Broadside on Broadway: Seven Poets Read was released in 1970 by Broadside Voices. Dudley Randall, Jerry Whittington, Frenchy Hodges, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks read.
- A sound recording titled Gwendolyn Brooks Reading Her Poetry, with an introduction by Don L. Lee, is available from Caedmon.
- A cassette titled Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton was released in 1993 through the American Academy of Poets on Tape Program.
“Thin gin” refers to drinking gin with a mixer such as ginger ale or tonic water, the point simply being that these pool players drink hard liquor. “Sing” and “sin” alliterate but “Thin” and “gin” rhyme.
Lines 7-8
“Jazz June” can have several readings. “Jazz” here is a verb and could mean to have sex, or a good time, with a woman named June. “Jazz June” could also mean have a good time in the month of June. Finally, these pool players might listen to or play jazz. During the 1950s, the time this poem was written, cool was the prevalent form of jazz, a music of intricate harmonies and subdued dynamics. By the last line of the poem, it is not exactly certain whether the players are bragging or noticing a profound problem with their way of life.
Themes
Appearance vs. Reality
Most assessments about the pool players in “We Real Cool” fall somewhere between the following two extremes: the players are cool or they are worthy of pity. The players are arguably cool because they had the nerve to drop out of school, perhaps have refused to work, because they drink (and might be underage), and because they engage
Topics for Further Study
- Conduct a research project on school desegregation in the 1950s, either by state or part of the country.
- Analyze the game of pool in terms of its history and sociology. Explain how pool came to be associated with the urban underclass and under-belly.
- Research the life expectancies of black youths versus white youths. Account for differences with research, or, in lieu of research, hypotheses.
in activities that are frowned upon or forbidden. In addition, and perhaps most important, the players are cool because they are fearless—unafraid of telling the truth (they are “straight shooters”) and facing the dangers that those who “sing sin” could encounter. If we accept this evaluation, the poem functions as a boast all the way through its last line, making the players cooler still. Conversely, these players can be viewed as deserving pity because they seem to be trying to boost their self-esteem by placing high value on meaningless activities. There is the sense that they are trying to forget their socioeconomic circumstances by drinking and playing games. In this way, they embrace the attitudes and activities that will only compound their plight. They have given up on means of advancement, such as education. Dying soon would not so much be tragic, but a way of escaping a harsh reality.
These are the extremes of perception—of appearance—that the pool players would have to struggle with and could not help but internalize. Their response might be to “shoot straight”: to those to whom they appear romantically rebellious, they might say that theirs is actually a life of confusion, fear, anger, and alienation. “We Real Cool,” then, is a cautionary tale for those who would think them cool. But to those who would condemn them, the players’ response might again be to shoot straight: “At least we haven’t been suckered into buying into a system that may not even reward us if we work hard and follow the rules.” In this case, “We Real Cool” is a defiant response to those who would condemn them out of hand and who unthinkingly accept the status quo.
Free Will and Chance
The last statement of this poem, “We / Die soon,” raises the question of whether these pool players have any control over their lives or if they are simply characters who will succumb to a predetermined fate. People often refer to “the luck of the draw” to describe a situation that is the result of chance; in this case, the pool players were born into a set of circumstances over which they had no control. Because they are not adults, they have no way of affecting their socioeconomic status. The players, however, show free will in that they choose to skip school, “Lurk late,” and “Sing sin.” Free will involves taking responsibility for one’s own action, and by making what many would see as negative choices—foregoing education and instead playing—they effectively have decided give up on their future and risk their safety by hanging around dangerous people and areas. Someone with a fatalistic viewpoint, though, would argue that it wouldn’t matter what choices the players made— any path they took would lead to the same place. This, then, is the difficult problem this poem tries to solve: to keep the reader from simply pronouncing the pool players either guilty (with free will) or innocent (subject to fate or chance).
Style
The monosyllabic words and quick lines of “We Real Cool” suggest the jabbing of pool cues and the short, fast life of the pool players. The poem is made up of four, two-line stanzas, each of which is end-rhymed. The lines also internally rhyme (“Thin gin”) or alliterate (“Strike straight”). The “We” at the end of each line is not for the purpose of rhyme, but rhythm. Normally, the voice continues on or falls at the end of a line. In this poem, however, the voice falls just before the end and then rises, yielding an unusual accented syllable at the end of each line—except for the last. This is due to the repeated foot throughout the poem, the rather unusual dactyl, a three-syllable foot with the first syllable accented and the following two unaccented. A dactyl yields a falling rhythm that is evident in the poem’s first three syllables: “We real cool.” Afterward, however, the dactyl foot is broken
Compare & Contrast
- 1955: Emmett Till, a black fourteen-year-old, is killed by white men while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, because he called a white woman, “Baby.”
1998: James Byrd, a forty-nine-year-old African American, is murdered in Jasper, Texas by several whites associated with the Aryan Brotherhood and Ku Klux Klan.
- 1957: A desegregation crisis occurs in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower sends in the 101st Airborne to stop whites from keeping black high school students away from a formerly segregated high school
1996: Proposition 209 passed in California, ending affirmative action at all campuses of the University of California.
1998: At the University of California at Berkeley enrollment drops for African-American, Hispanic, and Native-American freshmen combined, from 23.1 percent in 1997 to 10.4 percent in 1998.
- 1957: Samuel Beckett publishes Endgame, a bleak farce situated in a postapocalyptic landscape decimated by, presumably, nuclear weapons.
1998: India blows up several nuclear bombs as part of what is called a “test.” Pakistan answers with the same. The shows of force are part of a long-standing rivalry between India and Pakistan about territory and religion.
between the two lines of each stanza, with the accented “We” being placed on the line before. This unusual distribution suggests waltz rhythm or, if one pauses after “We,” jazz syncopation—a shifting of accents to unusual positions. The rhythm of the poem suggests a burst of bravado that quickly peters out, as if the pool players boldly proclaim who they are but cannot maintain that elevated status.
Historical Context
Brooks wrote “We Real Cool” at the end of the 1950s. To many, this decade, especially the period of eight years that contained the presidential administration of Dwight Eisenhower, is remembered as being a time of bland harmony. When popular culture looks back on the 1950s, it shows us a time of prosperity and innocence that was ignorant of the explosive, independence-minded “freedom culture” that was to emerge in the 1960s. To some extent, the 1950s were a socially peaceful time. On the other hand, the 1950s brought about unprecedented forward motion in the cause of civil rights, as local laws that had been used to keep blacks out of white social institutions were opposed by the federal government, and, in turn, the federal government was opposed by the supporters of segregation.
Although slavery had been abolished for nearly a hundred years, various laws had been enacted, particularly in the southern states, that made it impossible for African Americans to achieve equal social footing with whites. Late in the nineteenth century, a number of laws referred to as “Jim Crow” laws (after a silly, childlike Negro in an 1832 minstrel show) made it illegal for blacks and whites to ride the same trains, eat in the same restaurants, swim at the same beaches, and so on. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, most memorably in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, when the court ruled that it was not the federal government’s place to overrule states’ segregationist laws, as long as black facilities were “equal.” In practice, the facilities provided to blacks were seldom very equal, since businessmen had no motivation to duplicate their best offerings for society’s poorest members. In the mid-1950s, African-American resistance to the “separate but equal” doctrine began to have results. In December of 1955, after a secretary named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the city’s African Americans boycotted the transit system for a year, eventually winning integration and elevating local minister Martin Luther King Jr. to international attention. In 1953 Plessy vs. Ferguson was overturned by a new Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which recognized that “‘separate but equal’ facilities are inherently unequal.” In another historic case, the president had to send army troops to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine blacks who were entering the school because the state’s governor, Orval Faubus, tried using national guard troops to keep them out. Among the reasons why integration was finally able to achieve these gains were the hard work and peaceful protest methods of black organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Congress of Racial Equality. Peaceful organized protests had been held before, but in the 1950s television sets became common in most American households, and people could see for themselves the passivity of the protesters and the violence that was being used against them.
Critical Overview
“We Real Cool,” one of Gwendolyn Brooks’s best-known poems, was written in the late 1950s and was included in her fifth book, The Bean Eaters (1960). In 1972, Houston Baker called the attitude of “We Real Cool” “sympathetic irony.” In Brooks’s autobiography, Report from Part One, the poet remarked that the pool players “have no pretensions to any glamor. They are supposedly dropouts, or at least they’re in the poolroom when they should be possibly in school..... These are people who are essentially saying, ‘Kilroy is here. We are. ’ But they’re a little uncertain of the strength of their identity. The ‘We’—you’re supposed to stop after the ‘We’ and think about validity; of course, there’s no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don’t bother to question every day, of course.” In 1976, Barbara B. Sims wrote that the lines of “We Real Cool” are short to suggest the shortness of the lives of the pool players, and that the words “lurk,” “strike,” and “sin” suggest pool players who, outside the pool hall, thieve, rape, and kill. In a 1979 analysis of the work, Hortense Spillers stressed that, down to the very last line, it is the pool players who speak, implying that the poet does not actively intervene with commentary, especially in the last line. In Gwendolyn Brooks, the first critical volume on the poet’s work, Harry B. Shaw commented, not on the shortness of lines but on the monosyllables of dialogue, which indicate to him that the youths suffer from “aborted mental growth,” and are, in fact, “pitiable” and not cool at all. In an article in The Explicator, Gary Smith asserted that Brooks is ambivalent about the players: “To be sure, she dramatizes the tragic pathos in their lives, but she also stresses their existential freedom .....” The most extensive reading of the poem appears to by D. H. Melhem in his Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. After detailed formal analysis, Melhem, like Smith, also remarked on the poet’s ambivalence, but an ambivalence of a different sort: “.... this is a maternal poem, gently scolding yet deeply sorrowing for the hopelessness of the boys.”
Criticism
Joe Sarnowski
Joe Sarnowski is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Toledo. He has written articles for The Kentucky Review and the Encyclopedia of American War Literature. In the following essay, Sarnowski demonstrates how the poem can be read in two different ways—one way according to the dominant culture, another way according to the counterculture—and explains the social implications of this circumstance.
A poem can be interpreted in many different ways—a different way for each reader. But with some poems, particularly those dealing with contentious social issues, readers tend to align themselves with one of two sides. In these cases, the poem serves as a kind of door. That is, one door has two sides: you can be on one side or the other but not both. And yet, doors are points of access through which people can move in and out. Such a poem is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” While there is one poem, we can see it has two opposing sides: that of the dominant culture and that of the counterculture. As with a door, the poem can be used as the dividing point between these two sides. But also like a door, the poem can be an access point whereby one side can gain some understanding of the other. So ultimately, the challenge in the poem is not to understand what it means or even to determine on which side you stand; the real challenge here is what you will do with the viewpoints the poem conveys.
In one reading, the poem functions as a subtle, ironic indictment by the dominant culture upon anyone who deviates from its norms. This viewpoint is established in the poem’s epigraph: “The Pool Players. / Seven at the Golden Shovel.” Such a statement isolates these seven individuals for examination, making the body of the poem the findings of this examination. And what we find, then, are people flaunting the conventions of the dominant culture, thus bringing destruction upon themselves. Or, as George E. Kent remarked in A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, “the naive confrontations of youth with the ills of life will lead to their doom.” Notice, for example, how the seven “Left school.” This act is a violation of one of the dominant culture’s primary commandments: one must complete one’s formal education (how many times have we all heard, “Stay in school!”?). From here, the seven are seen to be caught in a downward spiral that leads to death.
By saying that the seven “Lurk late,” the poem suggests that they are sneaking around at night, which leads to the possibility that they are engaged in criminal activities. Thus, it comes as no surprise that they also “Strike straight”—that is, that they attack people or pick fights with others. Also, by saying that they “Sing sin,” the poem intimates that not only do they commit indiscretions but that they revel in their acts. This interpretation, in turn, leads members of the dominant culture to conclude that the seven have neither a sense of propriety nor a sense of shame. That they “Thin gin” reflects their abuse of alcohol—which is even more troubling when we consider that they may be underage. Just as troubling is the contention by Gary Smith, in his article for the Explicator, that “Jazz June” can be interpreted as a veiled reference to sexual activity or even rape (“jazz,” at one time, was a common euphemism for sex, while “June” is a female name).
Thus, says the dominant culture, this behavior will result in death; the seven will “Die soon.” Here, the inevitable deaths of these young people are tragedies that could have been averted if only they would have stayed in school and stayed out of trouble. Additionally, the fact that the seven always
What Do I Read Next?
- The World of Gwendolyn Brooks is a collection of five works: four volumes of poetry and her one novel, Maud Martha, all of which were written between 1945 and 1968. Maud Martha is about the coming of age of a black girl.
- Soul on Ice (1968) was written by Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther minister of information and U.S. presidential candidate on the Peace and Freedom Party. Cleaver writes about the forces that shaped his life during the 1950s and 1960s.
- A seminal work in African-American literature is W. E. B. Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1969), a series of essays on what it means to be a black American.
- Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) was written in anger, but the book is no mere diatribe. Fanon was a black psychiatrist and leading spokesman for Algerian independence and, in this important work, he details the role of violence in one of Africa’s many independence movements.
- Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets (1971) covers poetry from the 1850s to the 1960s and includes such poets as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka as well as Brooks herself.
- Malcolm X Speaks (1965) is a collection of the great leader’s speeches and statements from 1962 to 1965, before he was killed at the age of forty.
identify themselves as “We” indicates that each one has sacrificed his or her individual identity for the sake of being part of the group. As a result, each individual has lost his or her ability to think independently or to save him- or herself. Consequently, with all of these elements considered together, when we hear the phrase, “We real cool,” we hear it in a sneering or mocking way: none of these activities can be “cool” if they lead to death.
“... [I]t is a sense of pride—of group pride— that prompts the constant use of ‘We’ rather than the loss of individuality, as the dominant culture maintains.”
Of course, members of the counterculture would not view the poem in this way at all. These seven are people who, as Gary Smith says, live “in defiance of moral and social conformity and their own fate.” And it is the act of defiance that gives members of the counterculture their sense of identity. That is, whatever the dominant culture says not to do, the counterculture does in order to differentiate themselves from the dominant culture. So when the seven say “We real cool” at the beginning of the poem, they are confirming their sense of identity as being separate from the dominant, un-cool culture. The rest of the poem, therefore, becomes a catalogue of the acts that demonstrate their coolness—the very same acts that the dominant culture so deplores.
When the seven say they have “Left school,” they have effectively expressed their rejection of the dominant culture by rejecting its formal education—the primary way by which the dominant culture recruits its members. The assumption is that people will obtain good educations, seek gainful employment, and thereby become respectable citizens. But members of the counterculture do not want to be respectable citizens (or at least not “respectable” as the dominant culture defines the term). The seven have rejected the dominant society’s formal education in favor of the informal education of the pool hall and the streets. Thus, the seven confirm their counterculture status by maintaining that they “Lurk late”; as everyone knows, to have a good job and to be a respectable citizen, one cannot stay out late every night. But this is precisely what member of the counterculture chooses to do—again, in direct defiance of the dominant culture’s norms. In such a reading, this act of staying out late need not be indicative of criminal activity, so neither does the phrase, “Strike straight.” Taken literally, the phrase may mean that the seven do not shrink back when threatened but react directly. Or taken metaphorically, the phrase may mean that the seven take immediately to whatever pleasures present themselves. Such pleasures of course are intimated in the phrase “Sing sin.” Here, the seven do not repress the pleasures of life (as do, presumedly, members of the dominant society) but revel in them. Along these lines, that they “Thin gin” certainly indicates seeking pleasure in alcohol. Yet, by virtue of the fact that they “Thin” the beverage, it seems less likely that they are abusing it and more of an indication of playful mischief. When reading from this point of view, the meaning of “Jazz June” is not likely to refer to something as stark as rape; rather, as D. H. Melhem contends in Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, the “usage pertains to ‘having fun.’” And when we consider together all of these phrases made by the seven, it is this idea of “having fun” that comes to mind.
With this notion of “having fun” as the prime concern of the counterculture, it is difficult to read the final sentence, “We / Die soon,” as being a tragic declaration (as the dominant culture does). Instead, the seven seem to say that life is too short: that we all die too soon, so why not enjoy life while one has it? And even if the phrase does refer to the deaths of the young, this statement represents the ultimate defiance, the ultimate fearlessness. To face death without fear or regret is indicative of great pride—an admirable pride rather a vain pride. Additionally, it is a sense of pride—of group pride— that prompts the constant use of “We” rather than the loss of individuality, as the dominant culture maintains. (In any event, the counterculture would state, there is no greater loss of individuality than in compliance with the dominant culture.) Consequently, with all of these elements of this viewpoint considered together, we can perceive a different impression of the counterculture than the dominant culture offers. Instead of posing a threat to the dominant culture, the poem seems to contend, the counterculture merely regards a different set of values.
So, what can we conclude from this poem with its two, diametrically opposed points of view? Of course, the easy thing to do is to take one side or the other and, like a door, use the poem as a marker of division (“I’m not like those people!”). Yet, to do so is to contribute to the divisiveness that ultimately strangles us all. Instead, are you able— again, like a door—to use the poem as a point of access to understanding something about the opposing point of view? That is, if you find yourself agreeing with the dominant culture, can you begin to understand how some people can live for the moment? Or if you find yourself agreeing with the counterculture, can you begin to understand how there are limitations in living for the moment and advantages to becoming a respectable member of society? This is not to say that you must agree with what the other side thinks, but it does mean you have to be willing to make the effort to understand why other people value what they do. For only if people on both sides are willing to try to understand each other will communication between these sides be possible. And then maybe, just maybe, some barriers can be broken down. Gwendolyn Brooks has given you this poem, this door: you can either close it and walk away, or you can open it and walk through. What will you do now?
Source: Joe Sarnowski, in an essay for Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.
Sources
Donaldson, Gary, Abundance and Anxiety: America, 1945-1960, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
Kent, George, E., A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Melhem, D. H., Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.
Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds., A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
O’Neill, William O., American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960, New York: The Free Press, 1986.
Shaw, Harry B., Gwendolyn Brooks, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.
Smith, Gary, “Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool,’” The Explicator Vol. 43, No. 2, Winter 1985, pp. 49-50.
Wright, Stephen Caldwell, On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
For Further Study
Adams, Olive Arnold, Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till, The Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, 1956.
The story of Emmett Till, a black fourteen-year-old who was killed by whites for calling a white woman, “Baby,” is an important one in civil rights history. It is said that the story had a profound effect on Gwendolyn Brooks.
Albert, Judith Clavir, and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, New York: Praeger, 1984.
This anthology consists of essays by the leading lights (Mills, Ginsburg, Malcolm X, etc.,) and on the leading struggles (antiwar, counterculture, feminist) of the 1960s. The volume is introduced by an overview of the 1950s.
Burk, Robert Fredrick, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
Burk exposes the government’s failures regarding civil rights.
Goldman, Eric F., The Crucial Decade: America, 1945-55, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.
Goldman’s history includes material on Truman’s presidency, the end of World War II, the onset of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Eisenhower Era of Equilibrium.
Williams, Juan, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-65, New York: Penguin, 1987.
For a history heavily informed by those who participated in the civil rights struggle, this anthology can’t be beat. Not only does the volume include time lines, quotes, and photos, but there is an excellent PBS companion video series.