"Beverly Hills, Chicago" first appeared in 1949, in Brooks' second collection of poetry, Annie Allen. The poem describes the speaker's experience driving through the affluent white neighborhood of Beverly, Chicago, as someone who is neither affluent nor white. The speaker moves between physical descriptions of the neighborhood, their musings on the inner lives of its residents, and a discussion of the disparities that exist between life in Beverly and life in their neighborhood, which in the context of Brooks' larger body of work, we can imagine as being Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, or a neighborhood much like it.
Though Annie Allen received mixed reviews from editors and fellow poets alike, some applauding Brooks' penchant for experimentation and others cautioning her against obscurity, it was this collection which earned her a Pulitzer Prize the year after it was published. Brooks was concurrently working on her first novel, Maud Martha, and the demand for narrative and continuity in the novel form can be seen in the structure of Annie Allen, which both engages and satirizes the epic form.
"Beverly Hills, Chicago" appears in a section of Annie Allen entitled "The Womanhood" which contains fifteen poems dealing largely with humanistic issues of family, class, and race. On the whole, Annie Allen relies far more heavily on traditional poetic forms than Brooks' next collection, The Bean Eaters, but her second collection was certainly a move towards a distinct personal style. As D.H. Melhem said of the poems in Annie Allen, particularly of those in "The Womanhood" section, "They nurture the strength and freedom of Brooks's later style of grand heroic" (70).
