Her reputation as a poet somewhat overshadowed her only novel, Maud Martha (1953), which is, in many ways, a significant precursor of more recent fiction by African-American women. A poetic oeuvre grew to include more than a dozen books, including Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963) and In the Mecca (1968), nominated for a National Book Award. A sequence of poems about a black girl growing up in Chicago, it won particular praise for Brooks' innovation in poetic technique, the sonnet-ballad. It was for her second collection, Annie Allen (1949), that she was awarded the Pulitzer. In 1946 she won a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as a $1000 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) depicted everyday black life on Chicago's South Side, peopled with memorable characters. They divorced in 1969 but were reunited four years later. Graduating from college during the Depression, she did secretarial work, then in 1939 married Henry Blakely, also an aspiring writer.
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