Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, The.
Dunbar [-Nelson], Alice. The Goodness of St. Rocque And Other Stories. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899.
8vo.; previous owner’s discrete stamp on front endpaper and title page; preliminaries faintly foxed; green cloth, stamped in silver and black with palm tree motif; spine slightly worn. In a specially made green folding box.
Together with:
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Ruth. “Romances of the Negro in American History: Dramatic Episodes in Our History Told by Alice Ruth Dunbar-Nelson.” Wilmington, Delaware, n.d. [circa 1931].
8vo.; one sheet folded to make four pages; printed text covering two pages; cover with photo of Dunbar-Nelson; fine, but for a few flattened creases.
First edition of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s second book, a collection of short stories; preceded by Violets and Other Tales, an 1895 anthology of poetry and prose which garnered little critical notice and virtually no sales.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Dunbar; later in life she married Robert J. Nelson and hyphenated her name) was 20 when The Goodness of St. Rocque appeared. Immediately upon publication St. Rocque was hailed for its depth, richness, and its ability to evoke a particularly female, particularly African-American interior and exterior landscape. Today St. Roques is considered one of Dunbar-Nelson’s most important works, in part because of the unconventional and rebellious black feminist voice that many scholars—including Gloria T. Hull—detect as fueling the fictions.
Dunbar-Nelson was born Alice Dunbar in New Orleans in 1875. The second of two daughters, she was educated in public schools and at New Orleans’s Straight College. Her writing was strongly influenced by her southern background and history. The stories in St. Rocques, a series set in New Orleans and told in the Creole dialect, stand as early examples of American regionalism.
In 1900, Dunbar married Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the most important and influential black poet in the early part of the century. Although the two would soon separate, Dunbar-Nelson retained the many artistic and literary acquaintances she met through him. After leaving Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson moved to Brooklyn, where she earned her living as a teacher of Jewish immigrant students, a speaker, and through her contributions to periodicals. Dunbar-Nelson’s writings fused her personal, artistic, and political interests. She was an early scholar of black history, an active member of many black women’s clubs, and was heavily involved with the collection and preservation of oral tales recording the African American experience.
Dunbar-Nelson published little fiction after St. Rocques, but wrote several non-fiction opinion pieces for magazines. She died in relative obscurity and poverty in 1935, very much a victim of the Depression. In recent years Dunbar-Nelson’s work, like that of Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and others, has been reclaimed by feminist literary scholars. Professor Gloria T. Hull‘s book Color, Sex, and Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) played an especially large role in the resurgence of interest in Dunbar-Nelson, whose work is now taught in undergraduate and graduate English, women’s studies, and black studies departments across the country.
Loosely inserted into the slipcase is a flyer printing Dunbar-Nelson’s Delaware home address and advertising her availability for an upcoming lecture tour. The undated flyer (circa 1931—see Hull 99) prints a handsome photo of the author on the front; her talk, entitled “Romances of the Negro in American History / Dramatic Episodes in Our History,” is described as involving “ a series of five lectures telling some of the romantic stories of our history in which the Negro played a compelling part”; sample topics covered include “The Seven Fabled Cities of Cicola,” “Creole,” “Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Bannekaer,” “The North Star,” and “The Golden Gate.”
(#4634 / #4635)
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