Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird
Paul Laurence Dunbar
by Gene Andrew Jarrett
English | 2022 | ISBN: 0691150524 | 552 pages | True EPUB | 38.62 MB
by Gene Andrew Jarrett
English | 2022 | ISBN: 0691150524 | 552 pages | True EPUB | 38.62 MB
On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new 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…