In new collection, Dunbar shines as an essayist as well as a poet
The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley
Modern Library Classics, 441 pp., $14.95
With so much attention usually focused on the literary luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, Paul Laurence Dunbar never really seems to get his due as one of this nation's premier African-American writers.
That's because Dunbar died in 1906, more than a decade before the artistic and intellectual movement that produced, among others, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. Still, the specter of Dunbar's considerable talent and achievements inspired the writers of what, in the 1920s, was called the ''New Negro Renaissance."
By the turn of the 19th century, Dunbar, the son of former slaves, had become the first internationally recognized black poet. A graceful, dexterous writer, he was as adept at highlighting the African-American experience through colloquial language and dialect as through classic English syntax, in such acclaimed collections as ''Oak & Ivy" and ''Majors and Minors."
Yet Dunbar was also an accomplished essayist and author of fiction. With the centennial of his death approaching next year, ''The Sport of the Gods" is both timely and necessary as the first book to compile the breadth of Dunbar's most important writings, including his short novel for which this volume is named. Of course, the introduction of such Dunbar poems as ''We Wear the Mask," ''When Malindy Sings," and ''Sympathy" to new generations is always welcome. Still, it's the inclusion of 13 of his essays that is the true revelation here.
''Anyone inclined to view Paul Laurence Dunbar as an apologist for the South or as a white-identified 'Uncle Tom' would be quickly disabused of that view by reading the caustic, eloquent attacks on white racism that Dunbar published in newspapers," write Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley, who edited this collection, in an introduction to the book's nonfiction section.
Dunbar is at his most persuasive -- and scathing -- in ''The Race Question Discussed," written in 1898 as a response to the nation's racism against black soldiers who risked their lives in the Spanish-American War. ''This new attitude may be interpreted as saying, 'Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us. You may prove a strong bulwark when the bullets are flying, but you must stand from the line when the ballots are in the air.' " It's a sentiment that, with some sociopolitical variations, has been echoed by returning black veterans of every subsequent war.
In ''Is Higher Education for the Negro Hopeless?" Dunbar responds to an essay in which Charles Dudley Warner, a white writer, contended blacks were better suited for industrial training, not higher learning. Dismissing Warner as ''one who speaks without authority," Dunbar argues, ''I believe I know my own people pretty thoroughly. I know them all classes, the high and the low, and have yet to see any young man or young woman who had the spirit of work in them before, driven from labor by a college education."
In these works, the stoic young man in the starched collar, as Dunbar often appeared in photographs, is a force of unbending intelligence and fiercely argued opinions. As a collection, ''The Sport of the Gods" broadens not only an appreciation of Dunbar's wide-ranging talents but underlines the wealth of potential lost when Dunbar succumbed to tuberculosis when he was only 33.
