Paul Laurence Dunbar

March 14, 2022
A pioneering Black poet battles racism and his inner demons in this incisive biography from Princeton English professor Jarrett (Representing the Race). Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first prominent modern African American poets, writing popular collections along with short stories, novels, and musicals before dying of tuberculosis at age 33. (His poem “Sympathy” includes the line “I know why the caged bird sings,” which inspired Maya Angelou’s memoir.) Jarrett’s Dunbar is a writer on the make, a son of enslaved people who was raised in Ohio and who tirelessly marketed his work to editors and the public, and received the praise of such literary lions as William Dean Howells, whose rave review aided his career. But while benefitting from white patronage, Jarrett shows that Dunbar also chafed at white expectations that pigeonholed him as a writer of “Negro dialect” poems and “underappreciated his literary skills.” Jarrett situates his analysis of Dunbar’s ambitious, sometimes prickly intellect in an insightful, vividly written portrait of Black political and literary culture at the turn of the 20th century, and probes his subject’s alcoholism, gambling, and violent tendencies. The result is a fascinating exploration of Black creativity wrestling with social constraints and personal failings. Photos.

Starred review from April 15, 2022
The life of a 19th-century literary star. Jarrett, the dean of faculty and English professor at Princeton, draws on considerable archival sources to create a detailed, empathetic biography of African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), who, during his brief literary career, produced 14 books of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels. The son of two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky, Dunbar was a complicated figure--alcoholic, mentally and emotionally unstable, the preeminent Black poet of his time--who scorned the term "Afro American" as a "barbaric and clumsy affectation." Dunbar grew up in Ohio, raised by a single mother, to whom he was profoundly devoted throughout his life. He thrived in high school, studying Latin, Greek, and English literature, and was encouraged by his teachers. His early poems found a home in a weekly newspaper aimed at the Black community, which he and a classmate published together. As Dunbar's poetry became public, he was fortunate in attracting patrons--not least, Frederick Douglass, whom he met at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and, later, Booker T. Washington. In 1896, the eminent critic William Dean Howells gave Dunbar's second volume of poetry a favorable review in Harper's Weekly even though, to Dunbar's distress, Howells made a point of mentioning the poet's "racial phenotype and physiognomy." His eloquence and elegance made Dunbar a sought-after reader and speaker. A high point of his fame, Jarrett notes, was a reading tour of England. Wherever he appeared, he was hailed as a celebrity, but his career was often undermined by ill health: Among assorted ailments, he contracted gonorrhea and tuberculosis, to which he succumbed. Jarrett offers astute readings of all of Dunbar's works and a perceptive examination of his fraught courtship, engagement, and marriage to Alice Moore, which was threatened by Dunbar's "weakness for drink" and philandering. Impressive research informs a sensitive literary biography.

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