We Wear the Mask

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African American poet to win national recognition, and Frederick Douglass called him the most promising coloured man in America. Before his death at thirty-three he had written eleven volumes of poetry, five novels, four story collections, three librettos and a play. He drew on his formerly enslaved mother's oral storytelling and on his schooling as the only kind of pupil he was in an all-white classroom.

Willie J. Harrell Jr. gathers essays from the last two decades of scholarship, examining Dunbar's dialect, rhetoric and narrative craft as tools of racial uplift. The essays read his work against Reconstruction-era debates about advancement and the stereotypes of the early twentieth century. A substantial companion for students and scholars of African American literature, and for anyone who wants to look past the mask to the poet behind it.