Violets and Other Tales (1895) is a collection of stories and poems by Alice Dunbar Nelson. While working as a teacher in New Orleans, Dunbar Nelson published Violets and Other Tales through The Monthly Review, embarking on a career as a leading black writer of the early twentieth century. “If perchance this collection of idle thoughts may serve to while away an hour or two, or lift for a brief space the load of care from someone's mind, their purpose has been served―the author is satisfied.” With this entreaty, Alice Dunbar Nelson introduces her first published work with a humility and caution rather unfitting an author of such immense talent. In this collection of reflections, vignettes, short stories, and poems, Dunbar Nelson proves herself as a writer immersed in the classics, yet capable of illuminating the events and concerns of her own generation. In “A Carnival Jangle,” she provides a vibrant description of New Orleans during its legendary season of celebration. “The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ” presents itself as a newly discovered manuscript revealing Jesus’ travels in India. Dunbar Nelson’s brilliant prose style is nicely juxtaposed with her expertise in poetic form as she moves fluidly from love poems to religious verses, narrative poems to heartbreaking elegies. Only twenty years old when this collection was published, Dunbar Nelson executes a brilliant debut to a long and distinguished career in literature. This edition of Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Violets and Other Tales is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875-1935) was an African American poet, journalist, and political activist. Born in New Orleans to a formerly enslaved seamstress and a white seaman, Dunbar Nelson was raised in the city’s traditional Creole community. In 1892, she graduated from Straight University and began working as a teacher in the New Orleans public school system. In 1895, having published her debut collection of poems and short stories, she moved to New York City, where she cofounded the White Rose Mission in Manhattan. Dunbar Nelson married poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898 after several years of courtship, but their union soon proved abusive. She separated from Dunbar―whose violence and alcoholism had become intolerable―in 1902, after which Nelson taught at Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware for around a decade. She continued to write and earned a reputation as a passionate activist for equality and the end of racial violence. Her one-act play My Eyes Have Seen (1918) was published in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP. Dunbar Nelson settled in Philadelphia in 1932 with her third husband Robert J. Nelson and remained in the city until her death. Her career is exemplified by a mastery of literary forms―in her journalism, stories, plays, and poems, she made a place for herself in the male-dominated world of the Harlem Renaissance while remaining true to her vision of political change and social uplift for all African Americans.
