Recognized as the first Afro-American writer to publish a collection of black dialect poems, and described by French critic Jean Wagner as "the most interesting of Dunbar's contemporaries," James Edwin Campbell remains a little-known but fascinating figure. Campbell, writing in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, created charming and eloquent poems that several critics suggest might have served as models for Paul Laurence Dunbar's most popular pieces. Certainly Campbell, a successful educator, helped to popularize Dunbar's early efforts in his region, and both poets shared true mastery of a black theatrical tradition that combined carefully recorded folk idioms, ageless comedy, and moral instruction. Unlike the works of such white southern writers as Joel Chandler Harris and Harry Stillwell Edwards, Campbell's dialect pieces cannot be dismissed as caricature. Campbell's untimely death at the age of twenty-eight and Dunbar's enormous celebrity at the turn of the century have...