Maud Martha

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago, Illinois when she was just six weeks old. The Brookses were but one of thousands of Black families that traveled north and east in the early decades of the 20th century as part of the Great Migration. Her father was a janitor, and her mother was a teacher and an accomplished pianist. Brooks’s public-school education included a South Side neighborhood elementary school and three different high schools: the integrated (but predominantly White) Hyde Park High School, the all-Black Wendell Phillips High School, and the integrated Englewood High School. Brooks faced significant prejudice and racism from her White peers at the integrated schools. She did not pursue a college education beyond a two-year program at a public junior college in Chicago. But Brooks had begun writing as a girl—her first poem was published when she was just 13. Subsequently, she became a regular contributor to the poetry column in the Chicago Defender, a Black-owned newspaper. In 1939, at the age of 22, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., whom she met in the Chicago NCAAP’s Youth Council. They had two children. Brooks wrote steadily throughout her life and quickly came to national acclaim for her poetry in adulthood. After placing two poems in the prestigious Poetry magazine, she published her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her collection Annie Allen. She was the first Black recipient of that award. Brooks was active in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and continued to write and teach throughout her life. She was the poet laureate of Illinois from 1968-2000, the poet laureate of the United States from 1985-1986, and the first Black woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976. Her body of work includes Maud Martha, a novel published in 1953, and 17 long poems or collections of poems. She died in 2000 at the age of 83 and is buried on Chicago’s South Side.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s family came to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and although Maud Martha doesn’t mention this event directly, it plays a significant role in the history of Chicago’s Black community. The Great Migration was a mass relocation of Black individuals and families from the rural southern parts of the country into the urban centers of the north and northeast and into the western states. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated six million people moved in search of greater economic, social, and political freedoms. Nearly half a million people moved to Chicago. This in turn contributed to the Chicago Black Renaissance, an artistic movement that developed on the city’s South Side during the 1930s and 1940s, around the same time as the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. This movement fostered writers including Brooks herself, James Wright, and Lorraine Hansbury. The Chicago Renaissance differentiates itself somewhat from the Harlem Renaissance with its emphasis on a grittier literary realism as opposed to more folk-inspired works. Finally, World War II is happening quietly in the background of the last third of Maud Martha. This conflict, which ran from 1939-1945 saw 16.4 million people serve in the military, including over one million Black individuals, who faced the same racism and segregation in ranks as in the rest of society. 

In following the life of a working-class, Black, female protagonist from childhood through adulthood, Maud Martha bears more than a passing resemblance to Gwendolyn Brooks’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection Annie Allen. The novel is also in direct or indirect conversation with many other books, including Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), both of which were published within a year of Maud Martha. All three books provide deep insight into the experience of being Black in 20th century America, albeit through different lenses. The Invisible Man is a coming-of-age novel that explores its unnamed (Black) narrator’s experience of racism, Black nationalism, and the challenges of navigating one’s personal identity amidst structures of oppression. Like Maud Martha, Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel centered around the life of a Black teen named John Grimes. Differentiating Go Tell It from Maud Martha, the former has a strong emphasis on the roles of religion and belief in the Black American experience. By having its protagonist reading this next novel, Maud Martha puts itself in conversation with Of Human Bondage, published in 1915 by British author W. Somerset Maugham. It traces the life of a man who fails at being an artist and turns to medicine all while looking for happiness in his relationships with women. Of the many themes Of Human Bondage explores, it shares with Maud Martha an interest in the role love and relationships play in life, and the importance of finding meaning in one’s life despite its setbacks and hardships. Finally, with its dreamy, stream-of-consciousness narration and focus on specifically female experiences, especially of the constraints of traditional gender roles, Maud Martha has a similar feel to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) despite the difference in the biographies and experiences of the two authors.