LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was an African-American fiction writer, journalist, essayist, playwright and poet. Born Alice Ruth Moore on 19 July 1975 in New Orleans, she was the daughter of the merchant marine Joseph Moore, and his wife Patricia, who was a seamstress. The family was of mixed black, white and Indian ancestry, and Moore's complexion was so fair that she was often mistaken for a white person -- a fact which would have an impact on her writing, as well as her personal choices. From her earliest years, Moore immersed herself in European culture: literature, theatre and the opera. After graduating from Straight College (now Dillard University) in New Orleans in 1892, she embarked on what was to be a lifelong teaching career. After working at a New Orleans school for four years, in 1896 Moore and her mother left the South and settled with her sister and brother-in-law in a suburb of Boston. In the following year, Moore moved to New York City to take up a teaching position in Brooklyn. After spending a year there, she co-founded (with Viola Earle Matthews) the White Rose Mission (later the White Rose Home for Girls) in Harlem.

More about Alice Dunbar-Nelson at ProQuest One Literature

By Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Give Us Each Day: the diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
The goodness of St. Rocque and other stories by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
A stunning short story collection that takes the reader into the heart of the Creole community in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, from a key poet and journalist of the Harlem Renaissance.

About Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Color, Sex, and Poetry: three women writers of the Harlem Renaissance by Gloria T. Hull
A biographical/critical study of three poets--Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Writing from a Black feminist critical perspective, Hull recovers these Black foremothers and in the process shakes up the traditional Black literary canon.
Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Tara T. Green
Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. This is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance.Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson's life and legacy as a respectable activist - a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics.
Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable by James Nagel
A study of four volumes of interrelated short stories set in New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana bayous: Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk; George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days; Grace King's Balcony Stories; and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. James Nagel argues that the conflicts and themes in these stories cannot be understood without a knowledge of the unique historical context of the founding of Louisiana, its four decades of rule by the Spanish, the Louisiana Purchase and the resulting cultural transformations across the region, Napoleonic law, the Code Noir, the plaçage tradition, the immigration of various ethnic and natural groups into the city, and the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. All of these historical factors energize and enrich the fiction of this important region.