Böcker av Gene Andrew Jarrett

A Companion to African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the field from the eighteenth century to the present day. Embracing the full range of African American literature, essays explore forms, themes, genres, historical contexts, and major authors, and present the latest critical approaches.

On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA 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 "e;poet laureate of his race"e; hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "e;caged bird"e; that sings.Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.

For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on African American characters? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal or obscurity.

A political history of African American literature