By Brian Boone
February is Black History Month, so let’s take a look at some men and women of color who revolutionized American literature.
Gwendolyn Brooks
In 1930, Gwendolyn Brooks first published a poem, “Eventide,” in American Childhood — she was 13 years old. Within four years, she was a regular writer for the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s Black community. She moved into poetry full-time after World War II, with the collection A Street in Bronzeville published in 1945 and Annie Allen in 1949. The latter, a thematic work of semi-autobiographical poems that tells the story of a Black girl becoming an adult, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the first time the award was bestowed on a Black American.
Langston Hughes
The name “Langston Hughes” may not ring a bell, but his 1951 poem “Harlem” is etched into the cultural consciousness. “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” Hughes asks — inspiring the name of Lorraine Hansberry’s equally devastating 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. More than two decades earlier, Hughes proved highly influential and formative on the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement that brought Black authors to the forefront. Hughes celebrated and incorporated multiple forms of African-American art, taking musical elements of jazz and applying them to verse to make what ithers called “jazz poetry.”
Maya Angelou
Angelou is hardly obscure — she’s one of the few famous poets in American history. In 1993, she delivered “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, only the second poet to ever do such a thing, following Robert Frost at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. A multi-talented artist, Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actor, Pulitzer Prize nominee, Grammy winner, college professor, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She first entered the cultural mainstream with her first long work, 1969’s autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It topped the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list — a first for a Black writer.
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William Wells Brown
Brown was born sometime around 1814, and at the age of 20, he fled from slavery in Kentucky. He joined Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist movement, and in the 1840s became one of the most sought-after political orators in the U.S. and the U.K. That turned into a writing career which produced several milestones. His 1853 work Clotel, Or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is the first published novel by a Black author in the U.S. Brown’s 1858 play The Escape: or, A Leap to Freedom is the first play produced in the U.S. from a Black playwright.
Jupiter Hammon
The first Black writer, or poet, to be published in the Americas: Jupiter Hammon. Born a slave in New York state in 1711, he was taught alongside the household’s white children and later received his freedom from the man with whom he’d become business partners. Hammon devoted his professional life to writing, and on Christmas Day 1760 he composed the religious work in verse “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries.” It was published on its own the following year.