The Sport of the Gods

In this brilliant novel, Paul Laurence Dunbar — hailed by Booker T. Washington as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race" — presents a grim, ironic look at urban black life. The story of a displaced southern family's struggle to survive and prosper in Harlem, The Sport of the Gods, was one of the first novels to depict the harsh realities of ghetto life. Published in 1902, and now available for the first time in a single, affordable edition, this book marked the transition from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, and the revolutionary truths it uncovered still resonate today. "I should feel that he had made the strongest claim for the Negro in English literature that the Negro has yet made. He has at least produced something that, however we may critically disagree about it, we cannot well refuse to enjoy." —William Dean Howells