AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
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 ...