Works by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
(Poet, Writer)
[June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906]

• The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904, 2005)
  First published in 1904, The Heart of Happy Hollow features sixteen short stories that provide rare glimpses into the lives of African Americans after the Civil War. Through characters ranging from schemers to preachers, Paul Laurence Dunbar crafted a rare snapshot of long-lost communities and their poignant sensibilities. An author who achieved remarkable versatility, he draws on language that is by turns folksy and formal, capturing vernacular dialects as easily as he delivers a hauntingly poetic scene.
  
  In this collection, readers meet an influential entrepreneur who must navigate a treacherous political landscape; a Southern spiritual leader who must learn to accept the mores of his son, who was educated in the North; a reporter who restores hope in Santa Claus for a group of destitute siblings; and a host of other unique men and women giving voice to timeless themes.
  
  Written by a visionary whose work has experienced a recent revival among commercial and scholarly audiences alike, The Heart of Happy Hollow will introduce more book lovers to this revered storyteller.

• The Life And Works Of Paul Laurence Dunbar: Containing His Complete Poetical Works, His Best Short Stories, Numerous Anecdotes And A Complete Biography Of The Famous Poet (1907, 2007) by Lida Keck Wiggins

• The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1992, 1997),  William Dean Howells, ed.

• The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993), Joanne M. Braxton, ed.

• In His Own Voice: Dramatic & Other Uncollected Works (2002), Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau, eds.

• Selected Poems (2004), Herbert Woodward Martin, ed.
  Paul Laurence Dunbar was “the most promising young colored man” in nineteenth-century America, according to Frederick Douglass, and subsequently one of the most controversial. His plantation lyrics, written while he was an elevator boy in Ohio, established Dunbar as the premier writer of dialect poetry and garnered him international recognition. More than a vernacular lyricist, Dunbar was also a master of classical poetic forms, who helped demonstrate to post–Civil War America that literary genius did not reside solely in artists of European descent. William Dean Howells called Dunbar’s dialect poems “evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all.”

• The Sport of the Gods: And Other Essential Writings (1999, 2005)
  A watershed book in the history of African-American letters.
  
  Hailed by Booker T. Washington as "the Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," Dunbar offers an ironic look at urban black life, through the story of a Southern family displaced to turn-of-the-last-century Harlem.

• The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar (2006), Gene Andrew Jarrett, ed.

See also:

• The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1899-1967 (1969), Langston Hughes, ed.
  Includes works by Alice Walker, Frank Yerby, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others.

• Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (1973) by Jean Wagner and Kenneth Douglas

• The Negro Problem (2003) by Paul Laurence Dunbar and T. Thomas Fortune with contributions by Booker T. Washington, Charles W. Chesnutt, H. T. Kealing, W. E. Burghardt DuBois, Wilford H. Smith

• Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Courtship and Marriage of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (2004) by Eleanor Alexander
  A remarkable story of tortured love among the African American elite.
  
  When acclaimed African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar saw a photo of Alice Ruth Moore in a literary magazine in 1895, he sparked off one of the most important-and turbulent-romances of turn-of-the-century America.
  
  During the six years of their courtship and marriage, Paul and Alice enjoyed literary acclaim, received recognition as the vanguard of African American accomplishment, and gained access to elite white society. But beneath the idyllic veneer, Alice's life was marred by rape and brutality, Paul's by alcoholism, depression, sickness, and artistic self-doubt. After suffering a near-fatal beating in 1902, Alice left him to become an important suffragist, and when Paul died four years later, she had answered his ardent letters for reconciliation with only a single telegram: "No."

• A Freedom Bought with Blood African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II (2007) by Jennifer C. James
  In the first comprehensive study of African American war literature, Jennifer James analyzes fiction, poetry, autobiography, and histories about the major wars waged before the desegregation of the U.S. military in 1948. Examining literature about the Civil War, the Spanish-American Wars, World War I, and World War II, James introduces a range of rare and understudied texts by writers such as Victor Daly, F. Grant Gilmore, William Gardner Smith, and Susie King Taylor. She argues that works by these as well as canonical writers such as William Wells Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Gwendolyn Brooks mark a distinctive contribution to African American letters.