Li'l' Gal [Photographs of Period African-Americans] Decorated cloth hardcover - 1904

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904. Decorated cloth hardcover. Near Fine/No Dust Jacket.. Illustrated with photographs by Leigh Richmond Miner. Decorations by Margaret Armstrong.. Publisher's decorated green cloth over boards, gilt lettering at front cover and spine, gilt top edge, designed by Margaret Armstrong with light green stamped orange and cream art nouveau floral designs, 65 photographs by Leigh Richmond Miner of the Hampton Institute Camera Club. Decorations by Margaret Armstrong. The bindings are tight and square. Text clean, light even toning. Minimal shelf handling wear. 8vo, 8.25 inches tall; 123 pages with indexes of First Lines and Titles. A lovely collectable copy. First publication of the poems 'The Plantation Child's Lullaby', 'Blue', 'Charity', and 'Curiosity'. Ref: BAL 4951. Authentic-feeling Southern dialect of an earlier day. Background Information: One of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialectic verse. Dunbar's literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in turn-of-the-century America.  "Paul Laurence Dunbar stands out as the first African American poet in the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary distinction in what he wrote, and to maintain a high level of performance. He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form." [Johnson, Book of American Poetry]