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
In the sunlit streets of late-19th-century Chicago, where the Great Lakes breezes carried the promise of industry and the distant echoes of Southern migrations, Fenton Johnson entered the world on May 7, 1888. He would leave it on September 17, 1958, in the same city that had cradled his ambitions and tested his spirit, his seventy years a testament to the restless genius of an artist who refused to be confined by th…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Peace
