8vo. Original  black cloth gilt;  publisher's pictorial dust jacket.

FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY BROOKS: "Sincerely, Gwendolyn Brooks, April 15, 1997." Brooks published her first poem when she was 13 and her compositions were regularly printed in newspapers, especially The Chicago Defender, throughout her adolescence and early adulthood. A Street in Bronzeville, her first book of poetry, was recommended by Richard Wright to Harper & Brothers. Wright wrote that Brooks's poems "are hard and real, right out of the central core of Black Belt Negro life in urban areas...She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problems of color prejudice among Negroes." (Kent, A Life..., p.62).