Gwendolyn Brook "we Real Cool"

Gwendolyn Brook's short poem "We Real Cool," is featured in her 1960's book The Bean Eaters. Written in the early years of the Civil Rights movement, the book was inspired by social issues that were occurring in Chicago's south-side neighborhood of Bronzeville. In this particular poem, Brooks focuses on the educational integrity of seven pool players who she passes in her Chicago neighborhood, a pool hall called The Golden Shovel (Poets.org). Using the boys as the speaker throughout the poem, she is able to question what their innermost thoughts must be. "We Real Cool" uses literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, and irony to convey that as teenagers combine to form groups, their own individualism slowly diminishes.

Brooks was the first of two children born to Keziah and Dave Brooks on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Her paternal grandfather was Lucas Brooks, a field slave. Family history has it that Lucas threw his master into a hollow stump and escaped to join the Union Army (Kent 1). As for Brooks's maternal grandparents, they seemed to face less hardship then that of the paternal family. Keziah and Dave were wedded in July 1916 and raised their two children, Gwendolyn and Raymond, in the poor South Side section of Chicago. Her mother was a full time stay-at-home mom and her father gave up desire to attend medical school to work as a janitor (eNotes). Early on, Brooks experience racial prejudice in grade school and was often ignored by the other children. Finding comfort in reading and writing, her parents noticed their daughter's talent when she was seven, reading her scribbles of two-line verses (Kent, 5). Brooks was published in American Childhood at the age of thirteen with her poem "Eventide" (Kent, 5). At the beginning of 1934, she often wrote poetry for the Chicago Defender, a newspaper mainly read by Chicago's black population. Graduating from Wilson Junior College in 1936, she worked as a secretary for a spiritual charlatan and a maid. In 1938, Brooks met her husband when she joined the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Youth Council, Henry Lowington Blakely II, whom she married the next year (eNotes). They had two children, a son and a daughter