On February 10th, 1906, Alice Ruth Moore, estranged wife of renowned early 20th-century poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, boarded a streetcar, settled comfortably into her seat, and opened her newspaper to learn of her husband’s death the day before. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, son of former slaves, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed the most promising young coloured man in America , was dead from tuberculosis at the age of 33. This work traces the tempestuous romance of America’s most noted African American literary couple. Drawing on a variety of love letters, diaries, journals and autobiographies, the author vividly recounts Dunbar’s and Moore’s tumultuous affair, from a courtship conducted almost entirely through letters and an elopement brought on by Dunbar’s brutal, drunken rape of Moore, through their passionate marriage and its eventual violent dissolution in 1902.