What W. E. B. Du Bois’s Forgotten Romance Novel Taught Me About Writing

After my father’s death, I didn’t write for two years. Even reading fiction no longer interested me. But when a friend mentioned W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, a romance novel published in 1928, I was curious. The novel had been disparaged and overlooked by critics; maybe that’s why I was attracted to it. Did Du Bois, the renowned social scientist and activist—whose seminal book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, remains one of the most influential works of African American literature—really write a romance? I had never been a reader of , but death had recalibrated so much of my relationship to the world that it was hard for me to be definitive about anything, even my own tastes.