Folks from Dixie

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906) was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had been slaves in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar started to write as a child and was elected president of his class in high school. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper.

Whilst living in Washington, Dunbar published this collection of short stories. Folks from Dixie is written in the Negro dialect associated with the antebellum South. His work was praised by William Dean Howells, a leading critic associated with the Atlantic Monthly, and Dunbar was one of the first African American writers to establish a national reputation.

This early collection by Dunbar was originally published in 1898 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography.