DUNBAR, Alice.

£6,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Goodness of Saint Rocque, and Other Stories. First edition, in the beautiful original cloth, of the "first collection of short stories by an African American woman to be published by a major national press" (Gowdy, p. 226). Focused on the Creole milieu of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayous, this is the second of two books published during the lifetime of Alice Ruth Dunbar-Nelson, poet, journalist, and political activist.Her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), was a collection of prose and poetry published by the Boston Monthly Review in 1895. After it caught the attention of the popular poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the two married in 1898. "Dunbar's celebrity influence helped Alice place her second book... with Dodd, Mead in New York. Many readers not aware of her earlier book wrongly credited her writing success entirely to her husband's influence; however, notably absent from St. Rocque is the stereotyped black dialect that Dunbar, along with numerous white writers of the previous quarter century, had helped to popularize. Alice creates instead a group of characters who defy the overworked racial caricatures so common in post-Civil War literature" (Gowdy, pp. 226-7).Dunbar-Nelson (née Moore, 1875-1935) was born in New Orleans to her emancipated mother, Patricia White. She graduated in 1892 from Straight College (now Dillard University) and began work as a teacher at New Orleans elementary school. She moved to Massachusetts in 1896, and by the following year was

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