William Edward Burghardt Du Bois entered the world on February 23, 1868, in the small, rolling hills of Great Barrington, Massachusetts—a town where the air carried the crisp scent of New England pines and the quiet rhythms of rural life. Born into a family of mixed African, Dutch, and French Huguenot heritage, he was the son of Alfred Du Bois, a restless barber and laborer of Haitian descent who soon vanished from t…
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Stephen Crane, born 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, and dead of tuberculosis on 5 June 1900 in Badenweiler, Germany, lived only twenty-eight years, yet his work altered the direction of American fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is commonly placed among the major writers of literary naturalism, beside such figures as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, but the label only partly contains him. Crane was at once…
“I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
