She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

(Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join Union forces during the American Civil War. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985. Her poems many publiGwendolyn Brooksd while Gwendolyn Brooks attended Wilson Junior College ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7 1917 – December 3 2000) was an American poet.