Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird

"This biography explores the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a major nineteenth-century American poet and one of the first African American writers to garner international attention and praise in the wake of emancipation. While Dunbar is perhaps best known for poems such as "Sympathy" (a poem that ends "I know why the caged bird sings!") and "We Wear the Mask," he wrote prolifically in many genres, including a newspaper he produced with his friends Orville and Wilbur Wright in their hometown ofDayton, Ohio. Before his early death he published fourteen books of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, and also collaborated on theatrical productions, including the first musical with a full African American cast to appear on Broadway. In this book, Gene Jarrett traces Dunbar's personal and professional life in the context of the historical currents that shaped the author's development-to tell, in Jarrett's words, "the full story of an African American who privately wrestled with the constraints of America in the Gilded Age, but who also sought to express or mitigate this strife through the written and spoken word." Jarrett sketches the life and times of Paul Laurence Dunbar in three main parts. Against the backdrop of the CivilWar, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, the first section, "Broken Home," begins with the lives of Joshua and Matilda, Paul's parents, who were born enslaved, and ends with the years leading up to 1893, when Dunbar published his first book, Oak and Ivy, and befriended Frederick Douglass. The second section, "A True Singer," bookends the era when Paul entered his literary prime and became one of the first professional African American writers. The final section, "The Downward Way," details his troubled marriage to Alice Dunbar-Nelson, his illnesses, including tuberculosis and alcoholism, and his death. An epilogue comments on Dunbar's enduring legacy. The book includes more than 40 black-and-white photographs of Dunbar's family, friends, colleagues, and published works"--
On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings.Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.