Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

June 2003

Gwendolyn Brooks

Harlem Renaissance,
Women
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was born on June 7th in Topeka, Kansas. Brooks' family moved to Chicago when she was very young and she remained there for much of her life, later becoming a frequent contributor to local and regional publications and programs. She was chosen as the Illinois Poet Laureate in 1948 and was the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Down With Hemingway

American,
Jazz Age
For the record, I love Ernest Hemingway's books. I'd read most of them before I graduated high school and, only recently, some twenty years later, revisited Hemingway to finish out his canon. (Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast, and The Garden of Eden had been the few works I hadn't read.) Through the course of my re-introduction to Hemingway, I became disconcerted by the fact that I increasingly felt that he had fallen out of favor in modern times. It seems a popular thing of late to hold Hemingway in an unpopular light.