Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Life and Times of a Caged Bird
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
