his most important contribution to the African-
American literary tradition. In it Dunbar voices
his blueprint for survival in a white-dominated
world, later echoed in the work of major 20th-cen-
tury African-American writers like RALPH ELLISON,
JAMES BALDWIN, and JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN. The
first stanza reads,
“We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides
our cheeks and shades our eyes,— / This debt
we pay to human guile; / With torn and bleed-
ing hearts we smile, / And mouth with myriad
subtleties.”Here, Dunbar removes the mask that hides his
“tears and sighs” in favor of a proud and smil-
ing façade to reveal the tortured soul within. Like
the smile plastered on his false exterior, Dunbar’s
body of work has been progressively mined for the
“myriad subtleties” he alludes to, and the project
will continue as the understanding of his multifac-
eted writing grows. “We Wear the Mask” confronts
problems of human identity in universal as well as
racial terms. Our very existence, Dunbar seems to
say, depends on our ability to present a dignified
front in the face of life’s injustices.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunbar, Alice Ruth Moore. The Poet and His Song.
Philadelphia: AME Publishing House, 1914.
Gayle, Addison, Jr. Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul
Laurence Dunbar. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/
Doubleday, 1971.
Martin, Jay, ed. A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpreta-
tions of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1975.
Robert M. Dowling
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (1875–1935)
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a prolific writer, yet she
left few details regarding her background prior to
her emergence as an author. She was born Alice
Ruth Moore on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans, and
although her visage on her first published volume
represents middle-class respectability, she was
born in a poor, working-class neighborhood. Alice
was the second daughter of a washerwoman, Patsy
Wright, a biracial former slave. Monroe Moore,
probably a white laborer, is her father. She gradu-
ated from Southern University’s high school divi-
sion at 14 and entered Straight University, where
she trained to become a teacher and transformed
herself into a cultured society belle and a self-pro-
claimed Creole. By age 17 she had both graduated
and submitted manuscripts for publication.
In addition to being a schoolteacher, Alice
was an occasional bookkeeper-stenographer and
a devoted club woman, a charter member of the
Phyllis Wheatley Club, newspaper and current
events chairperson of the New Orleans branch of
the Woman’s Era Club, and the New Orleans cor-
respondent and local sales agent for the Woman’s
Era. She also wrote a weekly women’s column for
the Journal of the Lodge. In 1893 she won third
place in two short story contests, and in 1895, at
age 20, her first volume, Violets and Other Tales,
appeared in print.
Violets and Other Tales is a collection of short
stories, poems, essays, and prose poems. It was
widely and favorably reviewed as a testament of
racial uplift and an excellent representation of
the black race. In this first work, Dunbar-Nelson
introduces the reader to her favorite theme, New
Orleans and Creole society, one she would return
to in most of her published artistic writing. What
she does not explore is the color line, and very few
of her characters are racially marked. Dunbar-
Nelson was adamant about keeping politics out of
art, which many critics suspect may be one reason
that she is rarely examined as a writer. Yet this at-
titude did not prevent her from performing du-
ties as a “race” woman. Her journalism and club
work showed her commitment to racial uplift, and
although she was able to pass for white, her mar-
riages are also a testament to her race work.
Her picture accompanied her first volume,
and after seeing this image, PAU L LAURENCE DUN-
BAR began to court her. Theirs was a three-year
romance—two of which were by correspondence
only—that ended with an elopement in 1898. Al-
though their relationship was unstable from the
very beginning, with frequent sexual and physicalDunbar-Nelson, Alice 157