Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gene Andrew Jarrett
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gene Andrew Jarrett
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Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Life and Times of a Caged Bird

Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett

Narrator: Mirron Willis

Unabridged: 20 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/26/2022

Synopsis

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.

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 thirty-three.

About Gene Andrew Jarrett

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. He is also the coeditor of The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar and The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Carl on February 20, 2023

While listening to the audiobook I struggled at times as to whether or not I was enjoying this book, and whether I had more of an issue with the book or its subject. In the end, I concluded it was the latter. And I didn't come to that conclusion until I listened to the Epilogue. In it the author pro......more

Goodreads review by Bob on January 17, 2024

Summary: Perhaps the definitive biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African writers to achieve fame for his poetry and other writings. On the sesquicentennial of the birth of Paul Laurence Dunbar (b. 1872), Princeton University published this extensively researched biography of a man......more

Goodreads review by Miriam on December 08, 2022

I agree that Paul Laurence Dunbar is an important African-American literary figure, his literary output is significant and set the bar for future writers. I didn't need a long winded biography that starts in the 1700s, talks about slavery, the history of slave and non-slave states, and more. There we......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on April 06, 2024

I'm being a little generous honestly. I wanted to give up on it almost the whole time and probably should have. I listened to this one, and the narrator doesn't do it any favors. It was very dry. I did learn a lot.......more

Goodreads review by Nasus on October 28, 2022

This book tells the fascinating life of a talented African American poet, novelist, playwright, lyricist who lived and the end of the 19th century. His achievements were many and great, but the book gets bogged down in the letters between himself and his fiance/wife. This was a very dysfunctional re......more

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