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Authors
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) and Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)
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Editions include William L. Andrews’s James Weldon Johnson: Writings in the Library of America series (2004) and Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson in two volumes (1995), edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. Volume 1 is a collection of Johnson’s New York Age writings in role of “mass educator,” while volume 2 offers selections of social and political writings, discussions of international affairs, collegiate writings, and literary works. Robert E. Fleming’s James Weldon Johnson and Arna Bontemps: A Reference Guide, (1978) is still useful with its year-by-year, annotated checklist of material about the authors. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson, (1991) was edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson and chronicles Johnson’s career as songwriter, diplomat, activist, and professor; she has also given us an edition of Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1991), Johnson’s first-hand account of Harlem Renaissance period. Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths (1995) by V. P. Franklin is a study of Du Bois and Johnson. Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver (1997) contains helpful essays, and more are appearing with greater frequency in academic journals and collections, such as “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” in Politics of the African-American Novel (1991) by Richard Kostelanetz, with a focus on the “moral, political, and emotional ambiguities of passing”; “Public Acts and Private Utterances in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” by Nicholas L. Nownes Southern Studies (2005); and “The Cultural Matrix of Ragtime in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” by Timothy A. Spaulding, Genre (2004).
In Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (1973) Jean Wagner describes Dunbar’s generation as developing and influenced by the minstrel concept, popular music, and white writings, contrasting Dunbar with Harlem Renaissance poet such as Langston Hughes. Since then much new work on Dunbar has appeared, beginning with a 1999 reprint of The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar: Containing his Complete Poetical Works, his Best Short Stories, Numerous Anecdotes, and a Complete Biography, compiled and introduced by William Dean Howells in 1907. The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar (2006) edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett and Thomas Lewis Morgan is a much-needed edition, as was The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993), edited by Joanne M. Braxton, still the largest and most authoritative if not all-inclusive collection of Dunbar’s poetry. In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2002) fills some major gaps. A 2005 reprint of Dunbar’s 1904 collection of 16 short stories, The Heart of Happy Hollow, is available. There are dozens of juvenile biographies and collections of Dunbar’s poetry for children. In 1975 E. W. Metcalf published Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Bibliography. Felton O. Best’s Crossing the Color Line: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872– 1906 (1996) is a full-length biographical study of the author. In 1971 Addison Gayle published Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. A dramatic treatment of Dunbar’s life is contained in Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (2002) by Eleanor Alexander; though Dunbar and Moore were admired by African American literary society in their day, even compared to Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, theirs was a difficult relationship, to say the least, made worse by Dunbar’s sometimes violent and drunken behavior. Alexander analyzes the couple’s courtship and marriage in light of the social customs of the period, both within and outside the African American community, especially the negative effects of race, class, and gender on romantic love. Peter Revell’s critical book Paul Laurence Dunbar (1979) locates Dunbar within the socio-political contexts of his time, dispelling criticisms that Dunbar capitulated to racist stereotypes in his art in order to pander to a white audience. Liberating Voices (1991) by Gayle Jones is a study of the emergence of the black literary tradition with particular emphasis on Dunbar’s didactic poem, “When Malindy Sings,” and his short story “They Lynching of June Benson.” A new look at his relationship with Howells is “ ‘Entirely Black Verse from Him Would Succeed’: Minstrel Realism and William Dean Howells” by Gene Jarrett, Nineteenth- Century Literature (2004). Also of note are “Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Literary Dialects” by Herbert Penzl, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1993), and Marcellus Blount’s “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance,” PMLA (1992).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
These authors were virtually contemporaries, coming into their prime as artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Dunbar’s life was tragic and shorter than Johnson’s, but both of them had to negotiate an America in which possibilities and opportunities seemed to beckon suddenly and then vanish in an instant. What did it mean to be educated and gifted and black in 1900?
1. One good way to explore the world of Johnson and Dunbar is through archives of photographs. At the web site of the Connecticut Historical Society (http://chs.org) and the Library of Congress (http://loc.gov), look through the extensive archives of photographs of African Americans from around the turn of the century, sorting them into two general categories: photographs that African Americans commissioned for themselves and paid for (in other words, personal and family portraits), and photographs taken of African Americans by strangers and outsiders regardless of whether the subjects wanted those pictures taken. What differences do you see between how these African Americans preferred to see themselves and how others preferred to represent them? What bearing might that difference have on the predicament of Johnson and Dunbar?
2. On the web, find out what the best-selling autobiographies were, in America and England, around 1900; also, who were the best-selling poets from that time? How might those realities have influenced the way that Johnson wrote his own “autobiography” – as a gesture of accommodation or resistance, for example – and the voices that Dunbar experimented with as a poet?
