![]() ![]() Dunbar’s erudite and accomplished wife, Alice Dunbar Nelson, also used the word freely in their letters. Sadly, this wasn’t atypical for more fortunate Black people of the era. An example: “I dressed at the hall dressing room in all clean linen, but had to send a out for a standing collar because mine were all lay-downs.” But there’s one thing that jars like a wrong note every time it comes up: Dunbar regularly and casually referred to Black people of a lower social class than his with the N-word. In a new biography, the Princeton University English professor Gene Andrew Jarrett takes Dunbar’s rather glum, shortish life and pulls off a book that pulls you along like an open bag of potato chips for the first 100 or so pages, I could barely put it down. ![]() Paul Laurence Dunbar was perhaps the pre-eminent Black poet of the era after Reconstruction. ![]()
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