The Sport of the Gods

A Southern butler is falsely accused of theft by the white family he has served all his life, sentenced to ten years, and his wife and children go north to New York, where Harlem does the rest. Dunbar was the son of formerly enslaved parents and ran an elevator for four dollars a week while publishing his first poems; this 1902 novel is the first to put the Great Migration on paper, and it refuses every consolation. Newly typeset for this edition. Fifty-eight plates of American painting, from Winslow Homer to George Bellows, trace the same journey the novel does: families at work, at home, and adrift in the city.