JAMES EDWIN CAMPBELL

James Edwin Campbell (1867 – 1896) was a poet, journalist, editor, short story writer and educator. Born in Pomeroy, Ohio, Campbell was an 1884 graduate of Pomeroy Academy. He worked first as a teacher in Ohio, then in 1890 moved to West Virginia, where he served as principal of Langston School in Point Pleasant, and of the Collegiate Institute in Charleston, an agricultural and mechanical arts school for African-American youths. Active in politics and a skilled public speaker, Campbell moved to Chicago after marrying and became a staff writer for the Times-Herald. He contributed articles and poems to several periodicals, and participated in the publication of Four O’Clock Magazine. Campbell published two poetry collections, Driftings and Gleanings (1887) and Echoes from the Cabin and Elsewhere (1895), which
critics have judged to be the finest group of dialect poems of the nineteenth century. His promising career was cut short when he died of pneumonia in Pomeroy at age twenty-eight.

African-American Classics:
Graphic Classics Volume 22
144 pages, full color, $15

Coming in December 2011