Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (b. 1875–d. 1935) was born in New Orleans and raised there by her mother, Patricia Moore, a freedwoman of African American and Native American descent. She attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, earned a teaching degree at Straight (now Dillard) University, and taught in New Orleans’s black schools from 1892 to 1896. During those same years Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Ruth Moore) became active in the black women’s club movement, both locally and nationally, and began publishing in black periodicals. At twenty she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of stories, sketches, poems, and essays that brought her local celebrity. Leaving the city in 1896, Dunbar-Nelson continued to dedicate herself to teaching, activism, and writing—three areas of passionate commitment that shaped the rest of her life. She taught in Boston, then in Brooklyn where she also helped the writer and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews found the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for black women, while finishing her short story collection The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). In 1898 she married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then at the height of his success. Their union advanced Alice’s literary career: she published Goodness with his press, Dodd, Mead and Company, and enjoyed positive reviews. But his fame also overshadowed her accomplishments; after her death she was remembered primarily as his wife until scholars R. Ora Williams and Akasha Hull recovered her from obscurity. Paul and Alice separated in 1902, partly because of his abuse. Nevertheless, she kept his name and, following his 1906 death, promoted his legacy with projects like her anthology, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). For the next thirty years Dunbar-Nelson lived in Wilmington, Delaware, teaching for eighteen of them at Howard High School. During this period she was briefly married to another teacher, Arthur Callis, and romantically involved with Edwina Kruse, an educator about whom she wrote an unpublished novel titled The Lofty Oak. She worked as a paid and unpaid organizer, writer, and speaker for myriad causes, including suffrage, the war effort, the peace movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), anti-lynching legislation, education reform, and electoral politics. Although she never published another book of her own work, Dunbar-Nelson was a recognized Harlem Renaissance writer whose poems, stories, plays, essays, and reviews appeared in Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Book of American Negro Poetry, and she wrote nationally syndicated newspaper columns. In 1932 Dunbar-Nelson moved with third husband Robert Nelson to Philadelphia, where she died of heart disease in 1935.

Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

“Take the Mask Off”

On March 10, 1895, a young woman named Maud Clark wrote a letter to writer, performer, and activist Paul Laurence Dunbar in which she told him to “take the mask off.” This article takes this phrase as its analytical point of departure, seeking to reconceptualise, retheorise, and reinvestigate Dunbar’s biography through Clark’s words and the symbol of the mask. Repositioning Dunbar’s biography within the political, aesthetic, and psychological realities of his world, the article takes the symbol of Paul Laurence Dunbar in new directions, recognising the limitations of traditional biography and instead working toward a new and multifarious understanding of the man and his many masks.

Richard Wright and the Black Metropolis: From the Great Migration to the Urban Planning Novel

Early twentieth-century Black literature on the city from the likes of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen pondered questions of what it meant to be Black and urbane and also how to reformulate Black identity from a new position removed from the violent history of the South. While hints of criticism toward northern segregation appeared in those early works, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) offered the first intensive prognostication and condemnation of the ad hoc, discriminatory, and de facto system of segregation appearing in cities like Chicago in response to the Great Migration and used Wright’s informal study of sociology with the Chicago school to animate its project. Native Son, for all of its flaws, first considered how narrative can help explain and unspool the “neutral and egalitarian” guise behind the truly discriminatory urban planning-related practices and policies—from real estate to neighborhood covenants to zoning—that grew up with the start of the twentieth century and that continue to impact American cities through today.