The son of former slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most prominent figures in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century.
Gene Andrew Jarrett is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is coeditor (with Henry Louis Gates Jr.) of a forthcoming anthology, New Negro Criticism: Essays on Race, Representation, and African American Culture. Thomas Lewis Morgan is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research and teaching interests focus on critical race theory in late-nineteenth-century American and African American literature, specifically as it applies to the politics of narrative form.
“Dunbar’s short stories offered keen insight into American race
relations as well as the problems African Americans faced in the
nineteeth and early twentieth centuries.... He was more proactive
and subtle about inserting his own political views than many
critics, then and since, have given him credit for.”
“One hundred years after the death of Dunbar, he is most remembered
for his poem ‘We Wear the Mask,’ evoking the balance required of
blacks to survive and prosper in nineteenth-century America. This
collection of 103 of Dunbar’s short stories written between 1890
and 1905, including well known pieces and many that have gone out
of print, allows readers to see how the first African American
writer to enjoy huge success evolved as a writer. This is a
valuable collection for readers interested in Dunbar and his place
in African American and American literature.“
*Booklist, starred review*
“Dunbar’s nuanced strategies are on ample display in this first
comprehensive collection of his fiction...The stories in the volume
are complicated, entertaining, offensive, and moving.”
“What we have been presented with here is a Herculean task of
scholarship.”
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