Paul Laurence Dunbar and the project of cultural reconstruction.

Paul Laurence Dunbar presented a curious sight to the passengers who rode his elevator in the early 1890s. The clerks, craftswomen, and business managers of Dayton, Ohio, often saw the Century magazine in his hands (Matthews qtd in Martin, Foreword). (1) The occupants of that elevator were used to seeing elevator operators reading dime novels. But here was young Dunbar reading the Century, then the nation's preeminent magazine of culture. The New York monthly held, as one contemporary observed, a position of "undisputed primacy among American magazines" ("The Old Fashioned" 87). (2) The magazine could make an author's reputation instantly. For a poet of Dunbar's day, there was no surer way of forging a literary career than to publish in the Century. Against seemingly impossible odds, Dunbar not only broke into the Century, he also became one of the few poets enshrined in the magazine's literary pantheon.

The Century had the distinction of publishing three of Dunbar's poems in the year before Howells wrote his infamous 1896 review of Majors and Minors. (3) Thereafter, the Century championed Dunbar's career. The magazine published more Dunbar poems than it did any other poet during the decade of his productive career. (4) For Dunbar, the magazine was his most important literary outlet. He published more of his poems in the Century than in any other periodical. (5) The influence of the Century on Dunbar's career was immense. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the relationship between Dunbar and the Century editors who promoted his work. This relationship is vital not only for comprehending Dunbar's literary career, but also for understanding the racialization of US society around 1900. Dunbar's aesthetic was largely drawn from a cultural project initiated by the editors of the nation's premier magazines. The project's aim was nothing less than the formation of a national culture built out of regional local color literatures. But Dunbar's work exploded this project. The songs of this caged bird chattering and chanting in a literary dialect would, in a devastatingly tragic irony, transform the regional pretensions of the project into a US nationalism based, not in regional roots, but in purported racial essences.

Cultural Reconstruction

I the very years when Dunbar began publishing his own books of poetry in the early 1890s, the editors of the Century magazine were having trouble. For 20 years Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson, along with the editors at the other leading American magazines such as Harper's, the Atlantic, and Lippincott's, had been engaged in a massive attempt to change the course of US history and cultures. The fate of the nation, they feared, hung in the balance.

The Century's Gilder and Johnson had come to believe soon after the Civil War that the political reconstruction of the South had been a wrenching failure. Gilder and Johnson worried that the former Confederate states were as distant from the rest of the union by the early 1880s as they had been in 1860. To make matters worse, the rancor and clamor of post-Civil War political corruption threatened the country with collapse. Politics splintered the country into warring regional factions set against the ideals of sectional reconciliation. For men like Gilder and Johnson, the Civil War had become merely a prelude to future disaster. To counter the destructive divisiveness of politics, Gilder and Johnson spearheaded a project to invent a US national community. This project, which I call Cultural Reconstruction, sought to turn the ideal of national unity on its head: Instead of creating a unifying historical narrative of a single people, it would instead invent and reproduce regional difference. The goal of Cultural Reconstruction was to create a literary voice for each of the nation's regions and then bring those voices together in one great chorus in the pages of the monthly magazine--a cultural e pluribus unum. (6)

The greatest dilemma facing the project of Cultural Reconstruction was the paucity of capable southern authors. Gilder and Johnson devoted their magazine to the discovery and championing of writers from the former Confederate states. They published works as diverse as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes, and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales, leading an onslaught that overran American literature with hordes of southern local color stories. (7)

Dialect writing was vital to the project of Cultural Reconstruction. Gilder and Johnson demanded authors who could write about a region of the country because they were born in it, raised in it, steeped in its mercurial essences. For them, the vital sign of a writer's authenticity was his or her ability to write in literary dialect. Facility with dialect served as proof to American readers and critics of the day that an author was intimately bound up in a locality's history and ...