![]() ![]() ![]() She was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950) and the first African American woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976), but these are just two from an. Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life: one lived with wisdom, humour, protest, rage, dignity and joy. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is a new author for me, perhaps because she was primarily a poet. And the 'scraps of baffled hate'-a certain word from a saleswoman, that visit to the cinema, the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus-are always there. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams, too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. ![]() What, what, am I to do with all of this life? ![]() Introduced by Margo Jefferson, this is a miniature wonder of a novel by the celebrated poet and first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, published in Britain for the very first time. ![]()
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