Paul and Alice

This dialogue is composed of excerpts from the letters that Paul and Alice Dunbar wrote to each other beginning in 1895 and ending in 1904. The words they write are their words exactly. It all began when Paul saw Alice’s picture and read her sketch “At Eventide” in the April 1895 Boston Monthly Review, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The source for the letters is Eugene W. Metcalf’s dissertation entitled “The Letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar: A Private History.” Completed at the University of California, Irvine, in 1973, Metcalf’s dissertation was never published. The letters were reproduced from the originals, which were microfilmed in 1973 by the Ohio Historical Connection (formerly the Ohio Historical Society), Columbus, Ohio.

Original punctuation, misspellings, capitalization, underlining, and abbreviations have been preserved. To do otherwise would be to strip the letters of their authenticity. However, instances of obviously careless typographical errors, such as “fro” for “from” and “tc” for “etc” have been silently corrected.

The 361 extant letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar have not been published in their entirety with the exception of fourteen of Paul’s letters to Alice included in The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader edited by Jay Martin and Gossie H. Hudson (1975). Excerpts from the letters have been chosen to provide a continuous narrative.

The dialogue begins with an excerpt from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first letter to Alice Ruth Moore, dated April 17, 1895.

Act I

PAUL:

You will pardon my boldness in addressing you, I hope, and my interest in your work be my excuse. I am drawn to write you because we are both working along the same lines and a sketch of yours in the Monthly Review so interested me that I was anxious to know more of you and your work. I should like to exchange opinions and work with you if you will agree. The counsel and encouragement of one who is striving toward the same end that I am would, I know, greatly help. I enclose to you my verses on Douglass who was a very dear friend of mine, and also my latest lines.

ALICE:

Your letter was handed to me at a singularly inopportune moment—the house was on fire. So I laid it down, not knowing what it was and I must confess not caring very much. After the house was declared safe and the excitement had somewhat subsided I found it laid in my desk and read it somewheres about ten days later. But I enjoyed it nevertheless when I did read it, and those dainty little verses have been ringing in my head ever since I read them. I must thank you ever so much and though I don’t like to appear greedy, still if you have any more like them, please send them down this way. Your name is quite familiar to me from seeing your poems in different papers. I always enjoyed them very much.

PAUL:

After the long time that had elapsed since I wrote to you, I had entirely given up all idea of hearing from you. … I was glad that you had seen my name somewhere and so could not think that I was a presumptuous upstart, and not less glad to hear you say that you enjoyed my verses. I want to know whether or not you believe in preserving by Afro-American—I don’t like the word—writers those quaint old tales and songs of our fathers which have made the fame of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Ruth McEnery Stuart and others! Or whether you like so many others think we should ignore the past and all its capital literary materials.

ALICE:

You ask my opinion about Negro dialect in literature. Well, I frankly believe in everyone following his bent. If it be so that one has a special aptitude for dialect work, why it is only right that dialect work should be made a specialty. But if one should be like me—absolutely devoid of the ability to manage dialect—I don’t see the necessity of cramming and forcing...