A Sunset of the City

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is one of the most highly regarded American poets of the 21st century. Brooks won many awards and was the first Black American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her poem “A Sunset of the City” was published as a part of her fourth poetry collection, The Bean Eaters, in 1960. The widely praised collection includes some of her most notable poems and explores the racial and economic tensions of Chicago’s Bronzeville. While “A Sunset of the City” is among Brooks’s lesser known poems, critics often consider it an early example of her interrogations of race, gender, and class—themes that also characterize her more mature works.

This lyric poem’s speaker expresses her concerns about aging as a woman. More indebted to poetic tradition than her later works that were informed by her connections to the Black Arts Movement, the poem is more conventional in its use of language, images, and punctuation.

Poet Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, but, as a part of the Great Migration—a historical migration of millions of African Americans out of the Southern US—her family moved to the South Side of Chicago when she was six weeks old, and Brooks lived in Chicago for the rest of her life.