Literary Birthday – 19 July – Alice Dunbar Nelson

Alice Dunbar Nelson was born on 19 July 1875 and died on 18 September 1935.

Alice Dunbar Nelson Quotes

1. Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor’s chair.
2. In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race or nation or… art or self-expression.
3. It’s a punishment to be compelled to do what one doesn’t wish.
4. Picturesqueness is a lost art. We may expect at any time to hear that a collar ad is blazing its electric lights atop of the largest pyramid.
5. I am profoundly in the D’s – discouraged, depressed, disheartened, disgusted.
6. I sit and sew – a useless task it seems, My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams…

Alice Dunbar Nelson was an American poet, journalist, essayist, critic, and political activist. She was associated with the early period of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. She wrote Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar Nelson. Dunbar Nelson influenced the work of other black writers not only by her own precise, incisive literary style but also through her numerous reviews of such writers as Langston Hughes.

Source for image: Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Dunbar-Nelson.png

by Amanda Patterson
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