The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Paul Laurence Dunbar. African-american poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1872-1906). Introductory note by the author:

I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons apart from the author's race, origin, and condition. The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it for what it was in itself.