Gene Andrew Jarrett on Paul Laurence Dunbar: Biography and Legacy of the Poet Who Sang from a Cage

Description

Princeton University Press, hardcover

Pub Date: June 07, 2022

Publisher’s Marketing: 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.

Explore more from our collection.