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.
About the Author
Gene Andrew Jarrett is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. He is also the coeditor of The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar and The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Website geneandrewjarrett.com Twitter @GeneJarrett