Dean Jarrett told the little-known yet remarkable stories of how an African American poet born in Dayton, Ohio, captivated powerful political leaders across the so-called color line at the turn of the twentieth century. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s legendary accomplishments as a writer so intrigued Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York and, later, president of the United States, that over the years he grew to admire and sought personally to advance the poet’s literary success. And Booker T. Washington, the most famous African American at the time, promoted an industrial ethos of education with which Dunbar alternately agreed and disagreed as an intellectual, but which nonetheless brought them closer together socially. These alliances played key roles in Dunbar’s fascinating access to elite constituencies of readers and sources of political power in postwar America.