![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/thatdunbarboy.jpg\")
Huh. I thought I’d mentioned it, but The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar<\/a><\/em>, which I read in June, mentioned this book on the back flap or back of the dust jacket. I had the urge to read it, expecting it to be more than the Wikipedia entry which I have had in my browser’s bookmark since time immemorial (which is a short period of time these days, sometimes). I spotted a copy on Ebay, “signed,” and I wanted it. So for a long time (only a couple of months, I guess), I demurred, but I guess I was in the mood for some shopping therapy recently, and I bought it. It’s actually an incribed copy with a little message to John and George Bohnert–the inscription seems to indicate that they’re young brothers at the time of the inscription and not old friends of the author. Ay, me–I spent $25 on this book. I need to get some mylar to wrap it before I shelve it, or take it to ABC Books for them to wrap it (although Pam is gone, and I think she was the pro), or…. Never mind, I’ve lost it in the read stacks, which are almost as disorganized as the unread shelves, now.<\/p>\nSo: As a juvenile narrative biography from the middle of the 20th century, the book is designed to appeal to younger readers to give them a model to emulate. And, brother, Paul Laurence Dunbar is a good one. Born to a freed slave and the youngest of several children that a single mother kept together, Dunbar was a bookish and sickly young man with a facility for academics and wordcraft. He worked hard, attended high school (a rarity), but had to repeat his last year because he was not so good at mathematics. His young friends included Orville and Wilbur Wright, and they helped to publish his first book with their print shop before they went into bicycle repair and aviation. Dunbar met a lot of helpful people along the way, and he sold copies of his first self-published book and worked at a variety of jobs before landing steady work as an elevator boy which allowed him a lot of time to read, study, and craft poems. He had sort-of successful runs in London (before being abandoned there by his manager’s daughter who was supposed to be his shepherd on his English trip but apparently lived it up and left him in meager accomodations when she went on to the continent) and in New York, and then, bam, his sickliness is revealed to include tuberculosis, and he dies at 32, leaving several volumes of poetry and several hundred pages of mostly good poems.<\/p>\n
The book does confirm a couple of things: First, his vernacular poems were wildly popular in his day, even amongst black people and freed slaves who might have been pleased to see not only poetry written like they spoke but also capturing some of the stories and traditions they knew. Although he did not meet James Whitcomb Riley, they did correspond (I mention this in this paragraph because Riley also wrote in vernacular, that is, in misspelled and accented English, albeit different vernaculars for the most part).<\/p>\n
A bit of a ding on the book is that its school days take up the bulk of the book, and when we get to Dunbar as an adult, it gets a little more terse and a little more “six months later.” One does notice, however, that when being at about the poverty line, one can easily pick up and go to Chicago for months to attend the World’s Fair or move around a little more easily. You know, I’ve known this from some of the vagabonds I’ve known in my life. Couch surf for years at a time, rotating amongst friends, or just being able to pick up and move to chase a slightly better job with but a truck full of stuff (or less, probably, in Dunbar’s case). Being an early collector of books definitely has made this lifestyle impossible for me (I hope, but one never knows). But: To get back to the thesis sentence, the book is targeted at school kids, so perhaps that’s why the book is weighted to the school days.<\/p>\n
At any rate, an interesting read. And, an unfortunate one: Because now I’m perusing Ebay for old and\/or original editions of Paul Laurence Dunbar books which I cannot afford. At least, not until one of my damned apps goes viral or sells at least more than one copy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Huh. I thought I’d mentioned it, but The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which I read in June, mentioned this book on the back flap or back of the dust jacket. I had the urge to read it, expecting it to be more than the Wikipedia entry which I have had in my browser’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35566,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35565\/revisions\/35566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}