Maud Martha

It was while Maud Martha was peeling potatoes for dinner that Mrs. Burns-Cooper laid herself out to prove that she was not a snob. Then it was that Mrs. Burns-Cooper came out to the kitchen and, sitting, talked and talked at Maud Martha. In my college days. At the time of my debut. The imported lace on my lingerie. My brother’s rich wife’s Stradiva

And birthdays, with their pink and white cakes and candles, strawberry ice cream, and presents wrapped up carefully and tied with wide ribbons: whereas here was this man, who never considered giving his own mother a birthday bouquet, and dropped in his wife’s lap a birthday box of drugstore candy (when he thought of it) wrapped in the drugstore gre

She could neither resolve nor dismiss. There were these scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.

Annie Allen had won Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950.

There were no roughnecks here. These people knew what whiskies were good, what wine was “the thing” with this food, that food, what places to go, how to dance, how to smoke, how much stress to put on love, how to dress, when to curse, and did not indulge (for the most part) in homosexuality but could discuss it without eagerness, distaste, curiosit

She watched the little dreams of smoke as they spiraled about his hand, and she thought about happenings. She was afraid to suggest to him that, to most people, nothing at all “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

After their second dance he escorted her to a bench by the wall, left her. Trying to look nonchalant, she sat. She sat, trying not to show the inferiority she did not feel.

Brooks calls the book’s thirty-four chapters ‘tiny stories’. Like a sonnet sequence, each story delights in sensory and emotional details and each reveals another aspect of Maud Martha.

Annie Allen (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, making her the first ever Black author to do so;