Introduced by Margo Jefferson, this forgotten novel by the Pulitzer-winning poet is a miniature wonder, chronicling one woman's coming-of-age in 1940s Chicago.
What, what, am I to do with all of this life?
Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. 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 ...
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.
'I loved it and want everyone to read this lost literary treasure.'
- Bernardine Evaristo
About the Authors
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 - 2000) was an American poet, educator, and civil rights activist based in Chicago. Her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was greeted with critical acclaim and a Guggenheim fellowship. Annie Allen (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, making her the first ever African-American author to do so; and her only novel, Maud Martha, was published in 1953. In The Mecca (1968) was nominated for the National Book Award, the same year she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois. In 1976, she became the first African-American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 1985, the first to become Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry. She also published two volumes of autobiography and a book for children, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Throughout her life, she taught young writers and held numerous academic posts - she was awarded over seventy honorary degrees - and became a professor of English at Chicago State University in 1990 until her death in 2000.
Margo Jefferson is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times, and her writing has appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine and The Nation. Her memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and she is also the author of On Michael Jackson. Jefferson is currently a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Industry Reviews
'Alive, reaching, and very much of today.'- Langston Hughes
'One of the most spatially poetic novels ever ... Awesome.' - Eileen Myles
