Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Sport of the Gods is a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, first published in 1902, centered on American urban black life. Forced to leave the South, a family falls apart amid the harsh realities of Northern inner city life in this 1902 examination of the forces that extinguish the dreams of African Americans.

The son of former slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most prominent and publicly recognized figures in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Thirty-three years old at the time of his death in 1906, he had published four novels, four collections of short stories, and fourteen books of …