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Lyrics of Lowly Life
Lyrics of Lowly Life

Lyrics of Lowly Life


Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first commercially published book, reprinting poems from his self or privately published first two books, “Oak and Ivy” (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895), and adding eight new poems.

With introduction by William Dean Howells, “…at the time America’s most prominent literary critic, [who] wrote a lengthy and enthusiastic review of Majors and Minors’s dialect poems for Harper’s Weekly… The review gave Dunbar’s career as a poet a tremendous boost.” (ANB)

Contains several classic black “dialect” poems ranked among Dunbar’s best: “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” “The Corn Stalk Fiddle,” “When De Co’n Pone’s Hot,” and “When Malindy Sings.”


Description: Lyrics of Lowly Life

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896. First Edition. Frontispiece portrait, xx, 208pp. Sm. 8vo. Original, publisher’s green cloth with gilt stamped titling and decorations on spine and upper cover; untrimmed edges; top edge gilt. Binding design by Alice C. Morse, signed with her cipher “AM.” Light mottling to boards; mild sunning to spine; some rubbing to gilt on top edge. Overall a very good copy, sound and clean and with no previous ownership markings.

[3728940]

BAL 4918


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