Second-generation realist; or, Dunbar the naturalist.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)

From February to August 1897, Paul Laurence Dunbar lectured and recited poems across England, capitalizing on his international stature as "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," thanks in large part to William Howells's review of his poetry in 1896.1 During the tour's second month, in "the heart of a typical English home among the hills of Somerset," Dunbar began to write his first novel. The story, about a young man who resists his hometown's general insistence that his immoral ancestry predestines him for social failure, was so compelling that, over the course of only a "few" evenings, he wrote "sixteen thousand words in prose" (Martin and Hudson 442).

While writing the novel, Dunbar penned a letter to his fiancee, Alice Ruth Moore, about his progress: "My novel grows apace, though I can hardly call that a novel which is merely the putting together of a half dozen distinct characters and letting them work out their destiny along the commonplace lines suggested by their values and environment" (qtd. in Williams 171). In another letter, he elaborates this literary philosophy: "I ... believe that a story is a story and try to make my characters 'real live people.' But I believe that characters in fiction should be what men and women are in real life,--the embodiment of a principle or idea" (Letter to Alice Ruth Moore).

The words "destiny" and "environment" in the first letter, and the phrases "real live people," "in real life," and "the embodiment of a principle or idea" in the second letter, indicate Dunbar's awareness of the generic tension between realism and naturalism. Certainly, Dunbar, among other accomplished American fiction writers of his day, knew the protocols of literary realism--namely, economic characterization, sparing prose, streamlined exposition, and reportorial objectivity. He also knew that Howells, perhaps his staunchest supporter among cultural critics, determined these protocols for American literature. (2) Indeed, by the time Dunbar wrote the letters to his fiancee, Howells's intellectual and institutional leadership of American literary realism was unquestionable. (3) In contemporary American society, however, the counter-normative rise of naturalism was also indubitable, and this literary genre's discursive imprints are discernible in Dunbar's letters.

Philosophically, Frank Norris's essays on naturalism partially correspond with Dunbar's theory of literature. In one essay, "Zola as a Romantic Writer" (1896), Norris rightly identifies Howells as the leader of the realist-cum-genteel literary tradition: "We ourselves are Mr. Howells's characters, so long as we are well behaved and ordinary and bourgeois, so long as we are not adventurous or not rich or not unconventional" (168). Howells's vision of realism, Norris goes on to say, "is the real Realism." In another essay, "A Plea for Romantic Fiction" (1901), Norris argues that such conventional literary realism is superficial. "For [realism,] Beauty is not even skin-deep, but only a geometrical place, without dimensions of depth, a mere outside. Realism is very excellent so far as it goes" in dramatizing the minute, the mundane, and the everyday, "but it goes no farther than the Realist himself can actually see, or actually hear" (172). Norris exposes the falsity of Howells's…