In Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (2001), Eleanor Alexander attempted to provide answers to the many questions surrounding the mysterious and ultimately tragic courtship and marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore. 1 This union has been the greatest asset in keeping Alice Dunbar-Nelson from a fate, like many of the African American women writers of the turn-of-the-century and New Negro Movement, of ultimate obscurity. 2 Alice Dunbar-Nelson, prior to becoming Mrs. Dunbar, was as equally ambitious as her husband and had set herself on a path of individual achievement and fame. 3 Despite having entered the world of African American belles-lettres with a volume of her own prior to her marriage, she was not respected as a serious and talented writer until Gloria T. Hull's archival work of recovering and reinventing her reputation, along with that of Angelina Weld Grimke and Georgia Douglass Johnson, in Gloria T. Hull's Color, Sex and Poetry (1987). During the turn-of-the-century, African American authors flocked to the novel as representative of race literature and African American women writers led the way. 14 While early black male writers broke the barriers of publishing short fiction, the template set for the black woman writer vacillated between the genres of poetry and the novel.