The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (Classic Short Story Collections) - Tapa blanda

The brief life of Paul Laurence Dunbar began early in the first decade of “freedom” and ended barely into the twentieth century. His stories reflect the mood of his lifespan: from the bewildering innocence in the aftermath of emancipation, through the harsh lessons of reality, into the hard understanding of the magnitude of struggle ahead. Dunbar had lived at all the levels of black experience he reveals. He knew the languages and the challenges of each. This collection of tales lures the reader into his world with simple, sometimes humorous, stories of slave times and the early days that followed. But gradually the tone darkens; the tenor shifts into a more sober examination of that world and time. He never, however, abandons hope or leaves his audience with the impression that life is not well worth the struggle. “It is a little dark still,” he says in a later writing, “but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.”