People, Locations, Episodes

Alice Dunbar Nelson, Writer, and Critic born

Alice Dunbar

*On this date, Alice Nelson Dunbar was born in 1875. She was a Black novelist, poet, essayist, and critic associated with the early period of the 1920s and '30s.

Alice Nelson was born in New Orleans.  She was the daughter of a Creole seaman and a Black seamstress. She completed a two-year teacher-training program there at Straight University by age 17.  She studied at Cornell University, the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, and the University of Pennsylvania.  She taught at the elementary, secondary, and college levels until 1931. Her first collection of stories, poems, and essays, "Violets and Other Tales," was published in 1895.

Shortly afterward, the author and her family moved to Massachusetts. She later moved to New York, where she taught and helped establish the White Rose Mission. In 1898, she married the writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her short-story collection, "The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories," was published as a companion to her husband's "Poems of Cabin and Field" in 1899.  The volume helped establish her as a skillful portrayer of Creole culture.  She moved to Delaware after she and Dunbar separated in 1902; he died four years later.  She married a fellow teacher in 1910 and divorced him the following year; in 1916, she married the journalist Robert J. Nelson.

While not considered a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance for her literary contributions, Dunbar Nelson influenced the work of other black writers through her precise, incisive literary style and her numerous reviews of such writers as Langston Hughes. Alice Dunbar died September 18, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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