The Heart of Happy Hollow

The Heart of Happy Hollow is a collection of short stories by Paul Laurence Dunbar, published in 1904. It was the last short story collection Dunbar published before his death from tuberculosis in February 1906 at age thirty-three.

The stories are set in Happy Hollow, an imagined African American community that Dunbar used across several books as a fictional setting for stories about African American daily life in the post-Reconstruction period. The community draws on Dunbar’s observations of African American life in Dayton, Ohio, where he had grown up, in Washington D.C. where he had lived during his Library of Congress employment in the late 1890s, and in the various Southern locations he had visited during his speaking tours.

The collection includes stories of various kinds. Some are humorous treatments of community life and small-town African American social dynamics. Others are more serious treatments of the moral and economic difficulties facing African American families in the years when Jim Crow was tightening across the South and when northern industrial racism was producing its own constraints. Several stories deal with the particular pressures on African American men trying to maintain family stability in the difficult economic conditions of the period.

Dunbar’s prose fiction has been less well known than his poetry but is substantial work in its own right. He had produced four novels and four short story collections by the time of his death. The novels include The Uncalled of 1898, The Love of Landry of 1900, The Fanatics of 1901, and The Sport of the Gods of 1902. The Sport of the Gods is generally considered the strongest of the novels and is one of the early African American novels of urban migration that anticipated the later twentieth-century work on the Great Migration to northern cities.

The Heart of Happy Hollow collection runs about three hundred pages. The stories vary in quality but the best of them stand alongside the better African American short fiction of the early twentieth century. The book pairs with The Sport of the Gods and with the other Dunbar fiction. It also pairs naturally with the work of Charles W. Chesnutt, Dunbar’s slightly older contemporary, whose conjure tales and color line stories form the major body of late-nineteenth-century African American short fiction.