Dunbar, P: The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar

"Dunbar's short stories offered keen insight into American race relations as well as the problems African Americans faced in the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries.... He was more proactive and subtle about inserting his own political views than many critics, then and since, have given him credit for." "One hundred years after the death of Dunbar, he is most remembered for his poem 'We Wear the Mask,' evoking the balance required of blacks to survive and prosper in nineteenth-century America. This collection of 103 of Dunbar's short stories written between 1890 and 1905, including well known pieces and many that have gone out of print, allows readers to see how the first African American writer to enjoy huge success evolved as a writer. This is a valuable collection for readers interested in Dunbar and his place in African American and American literature." (Booklist, starred review) "Dunbar's nuanced strategies are on ample display in this first comprehensive collection of his fiction...The stories in the volume are complicated, entertaining, offensive, and moving." "What we have been presented with here is a Herculean task of scholarship."