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Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Ruth Moore

6 articles on Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Ruth Moore

  • Dunbar-Nelson, Alice

    Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

    Word Count: 1018      Includes:  Bibliography

    (b. 19 July 1875; d. 18 September 1935), short fiction writer, poet, diarist, journalist, and public speaker. Known mostly for her local-color short stories of New Orleans Creole life and romantic poems in conventional verse forms, Alice Dunbar-Nelson also worked as a teacher, journalist, editor, political campaigner, and clubwoman. Dunbar-Nelson struggled throughout her life with opposing forces: racial uplift expectations about the proper behavior and ambitions for a light-skinned, well-bred woman; the lure of urbanity; and recognition of the inadequacy of current strategies for civil rights. She believed that literary writing should remain separate from race work, but in her journalism, her diary, and some of her fiction and plays, one finds both pathos about being stuck between white and black worlds and frank reflections on the personal and ideological conflicts in the political and social organizations with which she worked. ...
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  • Dunbar-Nelson, Alice

    Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

    Word Count: 654      Includes:  Bibliography

    1875–1935
    American writer, journalist, and activist whose work focused on the multiracial experience, race relations, and women's rights. Alice Nelson was born into a mixed Creole, African American, and Native American family in New Orleans, Louisiana. She graduated from the two-year teacher training program at Straight College (now Dillard University) in 1892 and taught school at various times throughout her life. Dunbar-Nelson published her first book, a collection of poetry, short stories, essays, and reviews called Violets and Other Tales in 1895. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the well-known poet, began to correspond with her after admiring her poetry (as well as her picture) in a Boston, Massachusetts, magazine. They married on March 8, 1898.

    The Dunbars moved to Washington, D.C., where they were ...
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  • Dunbar-Nelson, Alice

    Source: African American National Biography

    Word Count: 1723      Includes:  Further Reading

    (19 July 1875–18 Sept. 1935), writer, educator, and activist, was born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans to Joseph Moore, a seaman, and Patricia Wright, a former slave and seamstress. Moore completed a teachers' training program at Straight College (now Dillard University) and taught in New Orleans from 1892 to 1896, then in Brooklyn, New York, from 1897 to 1898. Demonstrating a commitment to the education of African American girls and women that would continue throughout her life, Moore helped found the White Rose Home for Girls in Harlem in 1898.

    Moore's primary ambition, however, was literary, and she published her first book at the age of twenty, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of poetry in a classical lyric style, essays, and finely observed short stories. The publication of Moore's poetry and photograph ...
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  • Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Ruth Moore

    Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition

    Word Count: 2750      Includes:  Bibliography

    (b. 19 July 1875 ; d. 18 September 1935 ),
    poet, essayist, and short-story writer. If Alice Ruth Moore had not married Paul Laurence Dunbar she probably would not have attracted quite as much historical attention. However, with a life spanning the postbellum South to the Great Depression North, her story is uniquely representative of black women in the United States during this pivotal time. Moreover, she commands consideration for her many-faceted racial activism, club woman endeavors, passionate sexuality, vibrant and contradictory personality, and her achievements as a multigenre author whose work helped to maintain and extend the tradition of African American women's writing.

    Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans, Louisiana ...
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  • Dunbar-Nelson, Alice

    Source: American National Biography Online

    Word Count: 1455      Includes:  Bibliography

    poet, journalist, and political activist, was born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Joseph Moore, a seaman, and Patricia Wright, a seamstress. Dunbar-Nelson graduated from Straight College (now Dillard University) and began her teaching career at a New Orleans elementary school in 1892.

    Her precocious literary talent resulted in the publication of Violets and Other Tales in 1895. Publicity surrounding this volume led to an epistolary courtship with the relatively famous African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom she married in 1898. She had great personal ...
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  • Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore

    Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature

    Word Count: 725     

    (1875–1935), short fiction writer, poet, diarist, journalist, and public speaker. Born in New Orleans, of mixed African American, Native American, and European American background, Alice Moore graduated from Straight College with a teaching degree in 1892. She published her first book, Violets and Other Tales, in 1895, a multigenre collection, including short stories, poetry, and essays. The volume anticipates much of Dunbar-Nelson's later work, reflecting her interest in a range of literary forms, attraction to romantic themes and language, attention to class differences, and ambivalence about women's roles. Notable, too, is a characteristic absence of racial designation, perhaps a consequence of Dunbar-Nelson's complex and occasionally conflicting attitudes toward the intersecting lines of class and color shaping her Creole heritage. ...
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