“Something is Said in the Silences”: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Years at Harper’s

Abstract

Abstract This essay draws upon Gwendolyn Brooks’ 49-year correspondence (1944–93) with her editor Elizabeth Lawrence to trace the “publishing knowledges” that Brooks gleaned during her mid-20th-century career with the US firm Harpers & Brothers. First and foremost, their correspondence richly details Brooks’s growth as an experimental poet with a mainstream commercial firm. The aesthetic sociality of their editorial debates fostered also allowed them to explore personal and political intimacies; in this dimension, their correspondence (both the letters’ contents and epistolary form) sheds light on how Brooks and Lawrence navigated the shoals of race, gender, and liberalism in the notoriously patriarchal corporate culture of mid-20th-century US publishing. Finally, the arc of Brooks’s relationship with Lawrence at Harper’s charts is how US publishing transformed from its corporate to conglomerated forms. Taken together, these epistolary threads not only weave African American poetry into the literary history of an era-defining institutional realignment but also they demonstrate how Brooks’ and Lawrence’s cross-racial solidarity and commitment to an anti-corporate poetics comprise a continuum between Brooks’s career in mainstream US publishing and her later years in the Black independent press in the late 1960s. [P]ublishing at Harper’s was a shrewd, tactical choice [that] . . serve[d] Brooks’s evolving ideologies about art and politics.