abuse, Paul and Alice saw themselves as the black
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Her sec-
ond book, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other
Tales (1899), was a companion piece to her hus-
band’s Poems of Cabin and Field. After her mar-
riage, Dunbar-Nelson acquired her husband’s
agent and publisher and became forever known
as Mrs. Dunbar, despite her publication history
prior to their union and her two subsequent
marriages after his death. In The Goodness of St.
Rocque, she more fully develops the themes initi-
ated in her first collection, but she also focuses
strictly on the short story. She admitted that this
form was most representative of her work, and
she only sporadically produced poems after the
first volume; how much this shift to prose had
to do with her marriage to a famous poet is un-
known. The Goodness of St. Rocque is usually read
as local-color fiction, but again her characters are
not racially marked. Instead of race, she examines
class conflicts. Gloria T. Hull suggests that Dun-
bar-Nelson “used class as a psychological meta-
phor to replace race in her writings” (55). Perhaps
it is equally important to see Dunbar-Nelson as
instrumental in establishing a short story tradi-
tion in African-American literature.
In 1900, she published a “playlet” in The Smart
Set titled The Author’s Evening at Home—one of
only two attempts at drama. Her marriage to Dun-
bar lasted until 1902, when she separated from him
after a violent argument. Although he tried for four
years to reconcile, they were still estranged when
he died in 1906 of tuberculosis. Dunbar-Nelson
did not attend his funeral but became a devoted
widow, keeping his name alive by taking his mate-
rial on the lecture circuit and reading poems and
selections from his novels.
Dunbar-Nelson blossomed after her separation
from her well-known husband. She returned to
teaching and scholarship, studied at the University
of Pennsylvania and Cornell, and published an
article on Milton in 1909. She continued to write
fiction, mostly short stories but also a couple of
unsuccessful novel manuscripts that never found a
publisher. While teaching at Howard High School,
she secretly married a younger man, Arthur Cal-
lis, in 1910. Little is known about this union ex-
cept that it was short-lived. In 1916, she married
Robert J. Nelson, a journalist and widower. They
met while she was editing Masterpieces of Negro
Eloquence (1914), a collection of great speeches
delivered by African Americans as rhetorical in-
spiration for the younger generation; from 1920 to
1922 they published the Wilmington Advocate, a
liberal African-American newspaper.
In 1920, she edited The Dunbar Speaker and En-
tertainer, a collection of her late husband’s work.
Her marriage to Nelson seemed to propel her into
politics more than literary pursuits, although she
continued to submit pieces without much success
(a one-act play, Mine Eyes Have Seen, was pub-
lished in 1918 in The CRISIS) and was very pro-
ductive with journalism pieces. She was the first
African-American woman to be named a member
of the Republican State Committee. In 1921, she
was also a member of the delegation that presented
racial concerns to President Harding at the White
House, and she headed the Anti-Lynching Crusade
in Delaware.
Dunbar-Nelson returned to poetry during the
New Negro movement, attempting to adapt her
style to the new political age. Although her work
was accepted in African-American periodicals such
as The Crisis and Ebony and Topaz, she was still un-
able to make a literary name for herself. She is in-
cluded in JAMES WELDON JOHNSON’s anthology, The
Book of American Negro Poetry (1931). Strangely,
her reputation is fixed as a poet during this period,
although she produced far more prose.
Although she experimented with several
genres—poetry, short story, drama, novel, and
nonfiction—Dunbar-Nelson’s diary, Hull suggests,
may be her most important work. Written between
1921 and 1931 and reprinted as Give Us Each Day,
Hull states that “it serves to illuminate what it
meant to be a black woman/writer in earlier twen-
tieth-century America, while providing the accom-
panying background and contexts” (97).
Dunbar-Nelson emerged as a writer at a time
when the Victorian woman was becoming the
“New Woman, Race Woman,” who was encouraged
by the National Association of Colored Women
(NACW), the Women’s Era, and The Congress of
Colored Women of the United States to “Confront158 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice