Gene Jarrett
Professor of English
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| gjarrett@bu.edu Room 515 617-358-2554 |
Professor Jarrett has been awarded a year-long research fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University for 2010-11, where he will work on a definitive biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Born in Dayton, Ohio, Dunbar was the first African American writer to earn a living from his craft, as well as the first African American to be admired by both the nation’s president (Theodore Roosevelt) and its literary dean (William Howells) for his literary talents. Yet, privately, Dunbar’s stature made him miserable. Publishers pigeonholed him as merely a Negro who penned verse in Negro dialect. Each month, financial trouble forced him to publish and perform so many poems (and some more than once, in both America and London) that he could not help but sacrifice their literary quality. Personal misfortune worsened Dunbar’s commercial challenges. Alcoholism, violent behavior, mood swings, and recurring sickness strained his marriage and his relationships with family and friends. To paint the backdrop of this story, Jarrett will examine Dunbar’s correspondence about his family, study his ancestry, birth and childhood, the influence of his father (who was also an alcoholic and violent domestically), his life after his parents’ divorce, and his early adulthood. The biography, tentatively titled Paul Laurence Dunbar: The First African American Poet Laureate, reflects the broader concentration of Jarrett’s scholarship on the longstanding struggles of African American writers with racial representation, or the responsibility of portraying race in culturally and politically progressive ways. Dunbar is one of the more famous African American writers to fall victim to this burden while enduring a stressful private life.
Professor Jarrett will return to full-time teaching in the Fall 2011.