Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College, then married poet Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., writer for Wilson Press and father of their children, Henry and Nora. While on the faculty of Chicago Teacher's College, she graduated to professional poet with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), a landmark series of portraits highlighting the verve of city-dwellers. That same year, she won the Midwestern Writers' Conference Poetry award for the third year as well as recognition as one of Mademoiselle's ten outstanding women of 1945, which afforded her introductions to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
After her publisher rejected a novel proposal, Brooks shifted to woman-centered verse. She highlighted the ambiguities of women's lives with a mock epic, "The Anniad," in Annie Allen (1949), winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She experimented with a semiautobiographical novel, Maud Martha (1953), a repressed self-study that sidesteps family frustrations, and issued a children's compendium, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), a continuation of Chicago-based observations.
The burgeoning civil rights movement influenced Brooks' independent period. No longer courting white readers, she produced The Bean Eaters (1960), a collection of idiosyncratic verse that editors often pilfer for representative black verse to flesh out multicultural texts. Buoyed by critical response to Selected Poems (1963), she wowed critics with a dark, groundbreaking ballad series, In the Mecca (1968), based on her secretarial work for an evangelist. The text is a sophisticated satire of city opulence from the vantage point of a domestic worker, Mrs. Sallie, who searches a city center for Pepita, her lost child. The narrative concludes with praise for black heroes Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
