Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on 27 June 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, and died there on 9 February 1906, only thirty-three years later. In that brief life he became one of the most accomplished and consequential American writers of his generation: a poet of extraordinary musical discipline, a novelist and short-story writer, a public reader, a lyricist, and, in many ways, the first African American author to achieve a broad…
“I believe I know my own people pretty thoroughly. I know them all classes, the high and the low, and have yet to see any young man or young woman who had the spirit of work in them before, driven from labor by a college education.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
George Marion McClellan was born on 29 September 1860 near Belfast, Tennessee, and died on 17 May 1934. His lifetime stretched from the final year of slavery in the United States through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance. To read his poetry only as the work of a minor late-Victorian versifier would be to miss the extraordinary his…
“The epic of his race awaits a writer. The drama of an unwritten history covering about four centuries will welcome the facile pen of some gifted son or daughter.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Death & Mortality, Harlem Renaissance, Nature Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
