MAUD MARTHA

by Gwendolyn Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

By the author of A Street in Bronzeville, this portrait of Maud Martha has much of the quality of her poems and is a succession of fragile- suggestive sequences of Maud Martha who had a sense of beauty and of grace which would rarely touch her life. For Maud Martha at seven, who loved candy buttons, books and dandelions- which was what she chiefly saw in a poor colored section of a midwestern city, dreamed of other things; and when she married at 18, the dream of the home she would have became the actuality of a kitchenette apartment without a bathroom. Her tastes and aspirations are not shared by Paul- who likes fancy parties and sometimes showier women; she knows the humiliation of a houseworker's job; and always sensitive to the exclusion of the Negro in a white world, she cannot explain to her little girl why a store Santa Claus did not like her- or even smile at her..... The soft inflection here, the wider intimations of pleasure and pain give this its poignance and its charm. The Langston Hughes books suggest the market here which may be rather special.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 0883780615

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1953

Categories: FICTION