Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896.
Electronic Text available from University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative
Background Information
- African American poetryAfrican American Poetry contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a comprehensive survey of the early history of African American poetry, from the earliest published African American poems to the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poet to achieve national success and recognition. The authors and works included in the collection show the huge variety of this relatively unexplored area of American literary history: coverage includes writers from both North and South, from rural and urban backgrounds, and ranges from University-educated professionals to those for whom the very acts of reading and writing constituted a defiance of Southern slave laws. Generically, poems range from ballads, broadsides and humorous verse to Romantic odes, sonnets and historical epics.
- Black Studies CenterBlack Studies Center combines invaluable resources for research and teaching in Black studies: Schomburg studies on the Black experience, International index of Black periodicals (IIBP), The Chicago defender, ProQuest dissertations for Black studies, and Black literature index. This fully cross-searchable gateway to Black studies includes scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more.
- Gale Literature Resource CenterA literature database combining biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information on authors and their works (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, and journalism). Draws from Gale Group's core literary databases including Contemporary authors, Dictionary of literary biography, and Contemporary literary criticism. Provides additional search capability for Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of literature and Gale literary index.
Biographical Reference Works
- African American biographical databaseBiographical information on African Americans. Includes Chadwyck-Healey's microform collection: Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790-1950, obituary files, slave narrative collections, photographs, and illustrations; and the index to that collection, Black biography, 1790-1950. Biographical portraits from newly uncovered dictionaries as well as from other published reference sources, obituary files, slave narrative collections, internet sites, are added as the database expands.
- American National BiographyBiographical dictionary of about 17,500 notable American men and women from all eras of American history who are no longer alive. The ANB Online features thousands of illustrations, more than 80,000 hyperlinked cross-references, links to select web sites, and powerful search capabilities.
- Dictionary of Literary BiographyProvides access to biographical essays focusing on all genres and time periods of American and British literature and selected other literatures. Essays discuss the lives and careers of authors and summarize critical responses to their work.