Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

Hello my lovely readers! This book is an example of what I look for in biographies. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.

MY THOUGHTS
This was an excellent biography. There's often a fine line you have to balance on when writing a biography based on source material. If you don't have enough, then it becomes a "biography" with only sprinkles of the subject and a heavy focus on historical context.

Jarrett was perfectly balanced in providing historical context and information about Dunbar. 

Dunbar was....oof. That man had some demons. It's tragic that the sins of the father, eventually caught up with Dunbar. He had an alcohol addiction and was abusive to his wife Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He was a great contribution to the race, but, as is the case with the most talented people, a tortured soul.