renowned Broadway composer Will Marion Cook.
Dunbar’s naturalistic novel The SPORT OF THE GODS
(1901 in Lippincott’s; 1902 in book form) contains
a series of New York chapters that were inspired
by his time in that milieu. Set in New York’s Ten-
derloin, located just southwest of the Broadway
theater district, these chapters uniquely explore
the gambling, drinking, and ragtime music offered
in what JAMES WELDON JOHNSON later termed the
“black Bohemia” of the 1890s, not Harlem as many
critics mistakenly assume. Dunbar renders New
York as alluring but ultimately lethal for all but the
most resourceful migrants. Dunbar’s New York
experience was bittersweet; though a number of
his musicals and vaudeville shows were lucrative,
black reviewers began labeling him “the Prince of
the Coon Song Writers” for his perpetuation of
19th-century black stereotypes.
On March 6, 1896, Dunbar secretly married the
short story writer and teacher Alice Ruth Moore.
Dunbar had suffered from poor health since he
was a child, and by the time of his marriage and at
the height of his literary success, his health took a
substantial turn for the worse. Regardless of these
setbacks, he continued to write at a furious pace,
and in 1898 he published his first novel, The Un-
called, and his first collection of short stories, Folks
from Dixie. In 1899 two collections of his poetry
appeared, Lyrics of the Hearthside and Poems of
Cabin and Field. As in Majors and Minors, in Lyr-
ics of the Hearthside Dunbar placed the necessary
dialect poems at the end of a body of finely crafted
standard English verse.
In May 1899 Dunbar was diagnosed with pneu-
monia. Toggling back and forth from major liter-
ary centers like New York and Washington, D.C.,
to the salubrious climes of the Catskills and Colo-
rado, Dunbar continued to write poems, short sto-
ries, and essays for periodicals like the Lippincott’s
Monthly, the Century, the Independent, Harper’s
Weekly, and the Saturday Evening Post. While in
Colorado, he published The Love of Landry (1900),
a western of scant literary value; in that same year,
he published The Strength of Gideon and Other
Stories, containing realistic portraits of both blacks
and whites corrupted by racist American institu-
tions. In 1901 Dunbar published The Fanatics, a
portrait of white sectional tension and racism dur-
ing the Civil War.
Despite skyrocketing sales and critical acclaim,
Dunbar’s health declined rapidly, and he drank
to ease the pain. In 1902 he and Alice separated,
mainly because of his alcoholism, which led to
outrageous rants, and his increasingly violent
spousal abuse, which had always been a problem
but culminated in a vicious episode that year.
Soon after his breakup with Alice, he moved back
to New York and continued to write at a fantastic
rate. A year after The Sport of the Gods appeared
as a book in 1902, he published Lyrics in Love and
Laughter, which includes tributes to the leading
black activists Frederick Douglass and BOOKER
T. WASHINGTON as well as many autobiographi-
cal poems that allude to his illness and the times
he spent convalescing in the Catskills, Colorado,
and New England. In “The Poet” he laments his
audience’s insatiable demand for dialect poetry—
a “jingle in a broken tongue”—as opposed to his
standard English verse, which was the source of his
artistic pride.
In the fall of 1903, a combination of poor physi-
cal and mental health compelled Dunbar to return
to his mother’s home in Dayton. In that year his
collection of short stories In Old Plantation Days
came out, which included a series of relatively be-
nign stories of Old South plantation life, concret-
izing, in the eyes of many critics, his status as an
UNCLE TOM (see SAMBO AND UNCLE TOM). More
recently, scholars have revisited these tales, arguing
they contain more subversive comments on black
life than originally believed. His next collection,
The Heart of Happy Hollow, depicts crooked white
politicians and confidence men victimizing blacks.
Dunbar’s widely anthologized tale of southern race
violence and mistaken identity, “The Lynching of
Jube Benson,” appears in this collection. Dunbar
published three more volumes of verse, Li’l Gal
(1904), Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905), and
Howdy Honey, Howdy (1905), before his death on
February 9, 1906. Joggin’ Erlong was published
posthumously that year and includes the last poem
he ever wrote, “Sling Long.”
Dunbar’s standard English poem “We Wear the
Mask” (included in Lyrics of Lowly Life) is perhaps156 Dunbar, Paul Laurence