Paul Laurence Dunbar Av Gene Andrew Jarrett

<p><b>On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history</b><br><br>A 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 ¿poet laureate of his race¿ hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a ¿caged bird¿ that sings.<br><br>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 ac