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First edition, in the beautiful original cloth, of the "first collection of short stories by an African American woman to be published by a major national press" (Gowdy, p. 226). Focused on the Creole milieu of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayous, this is the second of two books published during the lifetime of Alice Ruth Dunbar-Nelson, poet, journalist, and political activist. Her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), was a collection of prose and poetry published by the Boston Monthly Review in 1895. After it caught the attention of the popular poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the two married in 1898. "Dunbar's celebrity influence helped Alice place her second book. with Dodd, Mead in New York. Many readers not aware of her earlier book wrongly credited her writing success entirely to her husband's influence; however, notably absent from St. Rocque is the stereotyped black dialect that Dunbar, along with numerous white writers of the previous quarter century, had helped to popularize. Alice creates instead a group of characters who defy the overworked racial caricatures so common in post-Civil War literature" (Gowdy, pp. 226-7). Dunbar-Nelson (née Moore, 1875-1935) was born in New Orleans to her emancipated mother, Patricia White. She graduated in 1892 from Straight College (now Dillard University) and began work as a teacher at New Orleans elementary school. She moved to Massachusetts in 1896, and by the following year was teaching in Brooklyn, New York. Dunbar-Nelson and her first husband separated in 1902 and she eventually moved to Delaware, where she increased her political involvement and became an outspoken champion for women's suffrage and civil rights movements in the US. In 1916 she married Robert J. Nelson, a journalist, politician, and civil rights activist, and together they co-edited and published the Wilmington Advocate, a progressive Black newspaper. She was also the first African American woman to be a member of the Delaware Republican State Committee, and in 1921 she formed part of a committee that presented racial concerns to President Warren Harding at the White House. Dunbar-Nelson "defected to the Democrats in 1924 following the failure of the Republicans to act on the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Dunbar-Nelson's tireless work in the burgeoning African-American women's club movement occupied a great deal of her time and energy and gained her notoriety. As a result of her involvement in the Delaware State Foundation, she was one of the founders of the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Marshalltown, Delaware, in 1920" (ANB). Her papers are held at the University of Delaware and represent "one of the most extensive and important archives from an early African American woman writer". Not in BAL. Anne Razey Gowdy, "Alice Dunbar Nelson", The History of Southern Women's Literature, ed. by Carolyn Perry & Mary Weaks-Baxter, 2002. Small octavo. Title page printed in red and black within frame. Original green cloth, spine and front cover lettered in silver and blocked in silver and black with pictorial designs by Thomas Watson Ball, fore and bottom edges uncut. Minor wear to corners and foot of spine, faint mark to top edge, inner hinges partially split but firm, a couple of marginal tears, fold crease to p. 3. A very good, unusually bright copy.
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