Maud Martha is Gwendolyn Brooks’s only published novella. First out in 1953, and later reissued by Chicago’s Third World Press, Maud Martha is the story of Maud Martha, a young Black girl coming up in Chicago, who likes “candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions.” It’s told in fragments, through Maud’s keen clear eyes, and it took Brooks a decade to write. “I wanted every phrase to be beautiful,” she said, “and yet contribute sanely to the whole, to the whole effect.”