Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird
560
Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird
560Paperback
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Overview
A 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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691254760 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2023 |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 672,350 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction 1
Part 1 Broken Home, Beginnings to 1893
Chapter 1 Broken Country 15
Chapter 2 Broken Home 47
Chapter 3 Public Schooling 77
Chapter 4 The Tattler 91
Chapter 5 A Superior Gift 110
Chapter 6 Career Choices 131
Chapter 7 The White City 152
Part 2 A True Singer, 1893 to 1898
Chapter 8 Chafing at Life 173
Chapter 9 The Bond of a Fellow-Craft 188
Chapter 10 Heroine of His Stories 206
Chapter 11 A True Singer 217
Chapter 12 England as Seen by a Black Man 239
Chapter 13 East Coast Strivings 263
Chapter 14 The Way Is Dark 278
Chapter 15 The Wizard of Tuskegee 294
Part 3 The Downward Way, 1898 to 1906
Chapter 16 The Wedding of Plebeians 307
Chapter 17 Our New Madness 327
Chapter 18 Still a Sick Man 351
Chapter 19 A Sac of Bitter Sarcasm 372
Chapter 20 Old Habits Die Hard 390
Chapter 21 The Downward Way 408
Chapter 22 Waiting in Loafing-Holt 421
Epilogue 449
Acknowledgments 461
Notes 467
Index 523
What People are Saying About This
“In this impressive biography, Gene Jarrett gives us the fullest portrait yet of one of the true originals of modern African American letters. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of formerly enslaved parents, achieved phenomenal success in his tragically short life with literary works that ranged from masterfully crafted poems written in both African American vernacular and standard English poetic dictions, and from fiction to Broadway lyrics. Dunbar’s poetry was required reading in segregated Black schools, and my parents’ generation regaled us with verbatim recitations of ‘When Malindy Sings’ and ‘When de Co’n Pone’s Hot.’ Yet, until now, the complexity of the mind and movements of ‘the first poet laureate of the race,’ within an America turning its back on the promise of Reconstruction and eagerly embracing the poisonous anti-Black discourse of Jim Crow, has eluded the scholar’s grasp. Jarrett has done far more than write a fascinating book for our times. By providing the definitive rendering of Dunbar’s flight, Jarrett has set free the artist who first heard the caged bird sing!”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University“Paul Laurence Dunbar is a magisterial, meticulously researched, and elegantly written biography of the first modern African American writer to attain commercial success and international prominence on the basis of his literary achievements alone. In this brilliant book, Gene Andrew Jarrett captures the tensions and contradictions of Dunbar’s life and situates him within the complexities of the period in which he lived.”—Valerie Smith, president of Swarthmore College“Addictively readable and intellectually sophisticated, Jarrett’s masterpiece is the definitive biography of Dunbar, his era, and the literary marketplace that nearly destroyed him. This searing history of the Black artist-celebrity will resonate with readers for what it says about Gilded Age American literature, race, and the traumas of Black genius, and for what it reveals about the liabilities of an American literary scene that devours its most gifted voices.”—Kerri K. Greenidge, author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter