The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar ed. by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar ed. by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader John Dudley (bio) The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. x + 305 pp. Cloth, $59.95; Ebook, $59.95. Already acknowledged as an important figure in the rise of African American literature and culture at the turn of the twentieth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar nonetheless remains a somewhat elusive and underexamined presence who made significant contributions to nearly every published genre during his brief career. Although long familiar as a poet who divided his efforts between dialect and conventional verse, his novel The Sport of the Gods has been increasingly recognized as a canonical work of literary naturalism on par with Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Frank Norris’s McTeague for its unvarnished portrait of urban America during the tumultuous Progressive era. Much of his other work, including three additional novels, numerous short stories, plays, song lyrics and librettos, and published and unpublished essays on literature, politics, and culture, remains rare in print anthologies or the classroom. In this context, Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader have produced a valuable edition of Dunbar’s correspondence, the first focused on his role as a writer, and an accessible volume that promises to stimulate further scholarship on the author’s diverse and compelling body of work. As Murillo and Nader note, several biographers have cited Dunbar’s letters from archival sources, beginning with Benjamin G. Brawley’s Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People (University of North Carolina Press, 1936) and Virginia Cunningham’s Paul Dunbar and His Song (Dodd, Mead, 1947). In recent decades, critics have largely relied on Jay Martin’s A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Peter Revell’s Paul Laurence Dunbar (Twayne, 1979) for references to Dunbar’s correspondence with such major figures as William [End Page 85] Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Theodore Roosevelt. Notably, the very recently published biography by Gene Andrew Jarrett, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (Princeton University Press, 2022), also extensively cites archival sources for Dunbar’s literary correspondence in painting perhaps the fullest portrait of Dunbar’s eventful life. An important precursor to this volume, Eleanor Alexander’s Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (New York University Press, 2001), draws upon correspondence from the turbulent relationship between Dunbar and his wife, whose own literary career, as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, has gained significant attention in recent scholarship. In a textual note, Murillo and Nader explain their decision to avoid reprinting the mostly frequently cited correspondence, familiar to many Dunbar scholars from the above sources, including much of the personal correspondence that documents disturbing details of Dunbar’s abusive behavior toward Alice, his close but difficult relationship with his mother, and his struggle with alcoholism and tuberculosis, which would claim his life at the age of 33, after a brief but prolific literary career. Indeed, it is the literary career that Murillo and Nader’s selections and annotations emphasize, and this approach offers a fascinating portrait of an author struggling to establish a creative career under extraordinary circumstances. Generally recognized as the first African American to make a living as a professional literary author, Dunbar’s accomplishments resulted from talent, ambition, and fearlessness, along with his canny willingness to capitalize on personal relationships and fortuitous opportunities. The son of parents emancipated from slavery, Dunbar was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where his first publications appeared alongside his high-school classmate and friend Orville Wright. Denied the opportunity to attend college, Dunbar sought every opportunity to publish while working often menial jobs through most of the 1890s, until the momentum achieved following Howells’s enthusiastic support of Dunbar’s second volume of poetry allowed him to leave his job as a reading room assistant at the Library of Congress in 1898 and pursue writing as his primary source of income until his death in 1906. Along the way, Dunbar...