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A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of 'goods' from Portuguese trading voyages--fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial 'opening up' of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case studies involving Florence and Rome, and drawing on unpublished archival material, Lowe documents the myriad occasions on which global knowledge became dissociated from overseas objects, animals and people. Fundamental aspects of these imperial imports, including place of origin and provenance, she shows, failed to survive the voyage and make landfall in Europe. Lowe suggests that there were compelling reasons for not knowing or caring about provenance, and concludes that geographical knowledge, like all knowledge, was often restricted and not valued. Examining such documents as ledger entries, journals and public and private correspondence as well as extant objects, and asking previously unasked questions, Lowe meticulously reconstructs the backstories of Portuguese imperial acquisitions, painstakingly supplying the context. She chronicles the phenomenon of mixed-ancestry children at Florence's foundling hospital; the ownership of inanimate luxury goods, notably those possessed by the Medici; and the acquisition of enslaved people and animals. How and where goods were acquired, Lowe argues, was of no interest to fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italians; possession was paramount.

Featuring twenty-five leading writers, an all-new collection of colorful and candid essays and other pieces about Freud and his legacy today With never-before-published contributions by André Aciman - Sarah Boxer - Jennifer Finney Boylan - Susie Boyt - Gerald Early - Esther Freud - Rivka Galchen - Adam Gopnik - David Gordon - Siri Hustvedt - Sheila Kohler - Peter D. Kramer - Philip Lopate - Thomas Lynch - Daphne Merkin - David Michaelis - Rick Moody - Susie Orbach - Richard Panek - Alex Pheby - Michael Roth - Casey Schwartz - Mark Solms - Colm Tóibín - Sherry Turkle W. H. Auden described Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as "a whole climate of opinion. / Under whom we conduct our differing lives." The controversial father of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Freud charted the human unconscious, brought us the talking cure, and wrote books that now rank among the classics of world literature. In On the Couch, the great analyst is analyzed by some of today's great writers and thinkers, who help us understand the man who has helped us understand ourselves as much, if not more, than anyone else, ever. The result is a fresh, multifaceted reassessment of Freud's continuing relevance and influence on ideas, literature, culture, science, and more. Here, Colm Tóibín writes about Freud, World War I, Henry James, and Thomas Mann; Adam Gopnik explores Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents; Susie Orbach considers Freud's "ordinary unhappiness" and D. W. Winnicott's "good enough"; Jennifer Finney Boylan reflects on penis envy and transgender; Peter Kramer describes how new science and drugs have revolutionized psychology since Freud; Susie Boyt, one of Freud's great-granddaughters, spends the night at the Freud Museum in London; Siri Hustvedt examines Freud's divided reception today; and there's much more. Filled with insights, provocation, and humor, On the Couch offers an original and nuanced portrait of Freud as a complex figure who, for all his flaws, forever changed how we see ourselves and the world.

A comprehensive, richly illustrated photographic field guide to the ferns and lycophytes of the eastern United States and Canada This is a comprehensive photographic field guide to the ferns, spikemosses, clubmosses, and quillworts of eastern North America. Accessible yet scientifically accurate, the book will appeal to beginners and experts alike and enhance the field experience of any user. Keys, range maps, detailed color photographs, and facing-page species descriptions aid exploration and allow reliable identification of all 305 species found in the area covered by the book--the United States east of the Mississippi and contiguous Canada, except for extreme northern and northeastern Canada. An introduction provides an easy-to-understand overview of identifying characteristics, life cycles, and evolutionary history. Checklists allow readers to record species they have seen, in four subregions. Indexes feature a complete list of common and scientific names, including synonyms, ensuring that users can find the plants they are looking for and keep track of changes in taxonomy. In addition, information about hybrids, polyploids, and reticulate relationships is provided, illuminating the fascinating processes that have led to such a rich diversity of species. Modern and innovative, this is the definitive guide to the ferns and lycophytes of eastern North America.Covers all 305 species, belonging to 96 genera and 30 familiesFeatures detailed color photos of all species--and facing-page species descriptionsProvides checklists for keeping track of species seenIncludes common and scientific names and notable synonyms

"A collection of quotations from the influential contemporary Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat"--

"The New Christians, largely former Jews and Muslims who were forced to convert to Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, were both a persecuted group as well as an international elite, and their story, argues Francisco Bethencourt, offers a fascinating and indispensable veiw into the period and the making of a global economy. In what is intended to be an authoritative and innovative book, the author will recount how the New Christians were a major force in structuring the Atlantic economy and reconstruct their involvement in trading system which ran from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Their hybrid religious allegiances, situated as they were primarilybetween Judaism and Christianity, provide a unique case of cosmopolitanism in various parts of the world. New Christian business practices, forms of organisation and codes of behaviour linked intercontinental networks to local agencies. Their ability to resist religious persecution implied alliances at the highest levels of the Catholic Church and the Iberian monarchies. This book will provide entirely new perspectives for our understanding of cosmopolitanism, religious allegiances, political alliances and business history. The New Christian trading elite has been studied in a fragmentary way, compartmentalised in time and space; but it has never been the subject of comprehensive research over the long term, from the forced conversion of the Jews in Portugal in 1497 to the abolition of the distinction between New Christians and Old Christians in Portugal in 1773, spanning connections between Europe, Africa, Asia and the New World"--

"Although thinkers of the past might have started from presumptions of fundamental difference and inequality between (say) the genders, or people of different races, this is no longer the case. At least in mainstream political philosophy, we are all now presumed to be, in some fundamental sense, basic equals. Of course, what follows from this putative fact of basic equality remains enormously controversial: liberals, libertarians, conservatives, Marxists, republicans, and so on, continue to disagree vigorously with each other, despite all presupposing some kind of basic equality. They may argue about who gets what, how much, and why, but the starting point - that all people are in some sense deserving of prima facie equal consideration - has become an axiom of our moral and political thinking. But why? Why are we basic equals? The trouble is that as soon as one asks for an explanation of this foundational premise, it begins to look shaky. After all, on any conceivable metric human beings are notably unequal, and often to striking degrees. Philosophers in this area tend to talk of equal worth, but often without trying to specify what exactly that means. Philosophically, basic equality is neither acceptable nor rejectable. It is not rejectable because we appear to be, as a matter of fact, profoundly committed to the truth of the claim that we are all one another's basic equals. But to the extent that there appear to be no philosophical arguments for believing in the truth of basic equality, it is not acceptable either. The aim of this book is to try and show why basic equality is acceptable. To do so, however, it will also contend that we need to approach the question rather differently to how it has mostly been handled so far. What's required is an exercise in what Bernard Williams called 'impure philosophy': it must include insights from other areas of human intellectual endeavour, whether psychology and history or even what we learn from how we go about practicing basic equality in our collective lives"--

A boxed collection of Jenny Holzer's renowned Truisms Jenny Holzer's Truisms (1977-79), comprising over 250 single-sentence declarations, were written to resemble existing aphorisms, maxims, and clichés. Each sentence distills difficult and contentious ideas into a seemingly straightforward statement of fact. Privileging no single viewpoint, the Truisms examine the social construction of beliefs, mores, and truths. Arranged in alphabetical order, Truisms were first shown on anonymous street posters pasted throughout downtown Manhattan, and they have since appeared on T-shirts, hats, electronic signs, stone floors, and benches. Holzer-isms presents a collection of these iconic phrases in a special form: a cloth-covered, foil-stamped box containing six folded posters designed by Holzer, each featuring a selection of Truisms, accompanied by a booklet with an introduction, biography, and chronology. The result is a beautifully designed object that offers a new way to experience Holzer's powerful and provocative text-based art.

The hidden life of the greatest surviving work of Inca art The most celebrated Andean artwork in the world is a five-hundred-year-old Inca tunic made famous through theories about the meanings of its intricate designs, including attempts to read them as a long-lost writing system. But very little is really known about it. The Royal Inca Tunic reconstructs the history of this enigmatic object, presenting significant new findings about its manufacture and symbolism in Inca visual culture. Andrew James Hamilton draws on meticulous physical examinations of the garment conducted over a decade, wide-ranging studies of colonial Peruvian manuscripts, and groundbreaking research into the tunic's provenance. He methodically builds a case for the textile having been woven by two women who belonged to the very highest echelon of Inca artists for the last emperor of the Inca Empire on the eve of the Spanish invasion in 1532. Hamilton reveals for the first time that this imperial vestment remains unfinished and has suffered massive dye fading that transforms its appearance today, proposing a bold new conception of what this radiant masterpiece originally looked like. Illustrated with stunning photography of the tunic and Hamilton's own beautiful illustrations, The Royal Inca Tunic demonstrates why this object holds an important place in the canon of art history as a deft creation by Indigenous women artists, a reminder of the horrors of colonialism, and an emblem of contemporary Andean identity.

A captivating portrait of the poet and the scientist who shared an enchanted view of nature Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical--and too dangerous for women. Natural Magic intertwines the stories of these two luminary nineteenth-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Just as Darwin's work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, Dickinson's poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science. Casting their two very different careers in an entirely fresh light, Renée Bergland brings to life a time when ideas about science were rapidly evolving, reshaped by poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike, painting a colorful portrait of the remarkable century that transformed how we see the natural world. Illuminating and insightful, Natural Magic explores how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim their shared sense of ecological wonder.

A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today. The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond. Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington

In this gripping sequel to his bestselling 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed--why some civilizations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever At the end of the acclaimed history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration. After 1177 B.C. tells how the collapse of powerful Late Bronze Age civilizations created new circumstances to which people and societies had to adapt. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians. Taking the story up to the resurgence of Greece marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the book also describes how world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and the alphabet emerged amid the chaos. Filled with lessons for today about why some societies survive massive shocks while others do not, After 1177 B.C. reveals why this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions and new opportunities.

A history that reframes the Bolsheviks' unprecedented attempts to abolish private property after the revolutions of 1917 The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia's governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution, Anne O'Donnell reimagines the Bolsheviks' unprecedented effort to eradicate private property and to create a new political economy--socialism--to replace it. O'Donnell's account captures the story of property in reverse, showing how the bonds connecting people to their things were broken and how new ways of knowing things, valuing them, and possessing them coalesced amid the political ferment and economic disarray of the Revolution. O'Donnell reminds us that Russia's postrevolutionary confiscation of property, like many other episodes of mass dispossession in the twentieth century, largely escaped traditional forms of record keeping. She repairs this omission, drawing on sources that chronicle the lived experience of upheaval--popular petitions, apartment inspections, internal audits of revolutionary institutions, and records of the political police--to reconstruct an archive of dispossession. The result is an unusually intimate history of the Bolsheviks' attempts to conquer people and things. The Bolsheviks' reimagining of property not only changed peoples' lives and destinies, it formed the foundation of a new type of state--one that eschewed the defense of private property rights in favor of an enduring but enigmatic new domain: socialist state property.

The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and culture An unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the most prominent and distinctive personalities of ancient Rome. Yet the traces he left behind are unreliable and tantalizingly scarce. Rather than attempting a conventional biography, Emily Gowers shows in Rome's Patron that it is possible to tell a different story, one about Maecenas's influence, his changing identities and the many narratives attached to him across two millennia. Rome's Patron explores Maecenas's appearances in the central works of Augustan poetry written in his name--Virgil's Georgics, Horace's Odes and Propertius's elegies--and in later works of Latin literature that reassess his influence. For the Roman poets he supported, Maecenas was a mascot of cultural flexibility and innovation, a pioneer of gender fluidity and a bearer of imperial demands who could be exposed as a secret sympathizer with their own values. For those excluded from his circle, he represented either favouritism and indulgence or the lost ideal of a patron in perfect collaboration with the authors he championed. As Gowers shows, Maecenas had and continues to have a unique cachet--in the fantasies that still surround the gardens, buildings and objects so tenuously associated with him; in literature, from Ariosto and Ben Johnson to Phillis Wheatley and W. B. Yeats; and in philanthropy, where his name has been surprisingly adaptable to more democratic forms of patronage.

How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York's combative intellectual scene In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. This prominent group was mostly male and Jewish, but also included women and non-Jews, and all embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism. A spellbinding chronicle of midcentury America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.

"Essays ... originally presented at a conference on Chinese literary criticism held in St. Croix, Virgin Islands in December 1970."

The Byzantines surrounded themselves with their saints, invisible but constant companions, who were made visible by dreams, visions, and art. This book aims to analyze the logic of the saint's image in Byzantium, both in portraits and in narrative scenes. It emphasizes on the poems inscribed by the Byzantines upon their icons.

Why now is the time to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution Throughout history, too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to vote. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress's ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all. Drawing on troubling stories of state attempts to disenfranchise military voters, women, African Americans, students, former felons, Native Americans, and others, Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted. He shows how a constitutional right to vote can deescalate voting wars between political parties that lead to endless rounds of litigation and undermine voter confidence in elections, and can safeguard democracy against dangerous attempts at election subversion like the one we witnessed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The path to a constitutional amendment is undoubtedly hard, especially in these polarized times. A Real Right to Vote explains what's in it for conservatives who have resisted voting reform, and reveals how the pursuit of an amendment can yield tangible dividends for democracy long before ratification.

A definitive new volume of the retirement papers of Thomas Jefferson During the period covered by the 575 documents in this volume, Jefferson advises President James Monroe on what later becomes known as the "Monroe Doctrine." He also approves of the Greek independence movement in correspondence with the scholar and political leader Adamantios Coray. Jefferson says that the "most dangerous blot" on the U.S. Constitution is the provision under which a vote by the states in the House of Representatives decides elections not settled by the Electoral College. With his allies in Virginia's General Assembly, he succeeds in converting the University of Virginia's loans from the state Literary Fund into an outright grant and obtains an additional $50,000 for books and scientific instruments. He seeks advice on regulating and equipping the institution, helps to obtain its architectural capitals, and designs its gymnasia. Jefferson describes coffee as "the favorite beverage of the civilised world" and advises a namesake child to "Adore God. reverence and cherish your parents. love your neighbor as yourself; and your country more than life. be just. be true. murmur not at the ways of Providence, and the life into which you have entered will be the passage to one of eternal and ineffable bliss."

A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces insured the easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined "small" violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

"Strategically located on the Atlantic Ocean at the westernmost point of the continent, Senegal is well-known as an epicenter of Africa's modernities, modernisms, and liberation movements. It was also one of the countries where the daguerreotype first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa before circulating inland and across the region. At that time, Senegal did not exist as a nation state; local kingdoms were still in power and the French presence was limited to trading posts along the coast. The pioneers of photography in the 1840s were not exclusively Europeans, but also African, African-American, and Asian entrepreneurs. In the decades that followed, amateurs and professionals working in rural areas continued to explore and expand photography's possibilities. Senegal's photographic histories thrived as part of a global visual economy during and despite the colonial experience. Its works emerged as an integral part of the history of this medium, which unlike any other was a global enterprise from the very beginning. Portrait and place offers the first history of photography in this important country, from its first iterations, photographers, and patrons of the 1840s to photographers such as Oumar Ka (b. 1930) and Mama Casset (1908-1992), who were were active in the 1960s during the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era. Giulia Paoletti presents close studies of photographs, firmly anchoring these objects, their authors, and their consumers in a global context that extends across West Africa, the Black Atlantic, and the greater Islamic community-in other words, beyond the borders of colonial empire. Based on over ten years of field and archival research in Senegal, this book features almost exclusively new, previously unpublished visual material and explores both professional and amateur artists working in a wide variety of genres, from landscape to portraiture, and in media such as daguerreotypes and glass paintings. As the first book to focus exclusively on Senegal's photographic histories, Portrait and place expands the notions of what the medium has been and can be, from a Eurocentric model to one that is decidedly-insistingly-larger and more inclusive"--

An invaluable reference book on the mathematics of Greek antiquity Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius are familiar names to many of us, and their contributions have shaped mathematical practice up to modern times. Yet the mathematical activity of Greek antiquity extended far beyond their achievements and was furthered by diverse individuals in different contexts. Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean brings together an extensive collection of primary source materials that document the extraordinary breadth of mathematical ideas developed in the Eastern Mediterranean from 500 BCE to 500 CE, a millennium in which Greek cultural influence spanned the ancient world. Weaving together ancient commentaries with the works themselves, Victor Katz and Clemency Montelle present a wealth of newly translated texts along with sources difficult to find elsewhere, from writings by the great mathematical thinkers of Greek antiquity to those by practitioners who used mathematics in everyday life. This comprehensive and wide-ranging sourcebook includes lesser-known authors who made critical contributions, sometimes in languages other than Greek, as well as accounts of technical instrumentation, papyri by anonymous authors designed for teaching purposes, and evidence of hand computations and numerical tables. An essential resource for anyone interested in the mathematical achievements of this remarkable intellectual culture, Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean encompasses disciplines that illustrate the important role of mathematics in ancient Greek society more broadly, from astronomy, music, and optics to philosophy, literature, and theater.

Mixing passion and humor, a personal work of literary criticism that demonstrates how the greatest books illuminate our livesWhy do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor's life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person-and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature's knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters' lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge-and come to understand its cost.In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.

On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "e;poet laureate of his race"e; hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "e;caged bird"e; that sings.Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.