On May 7, 1895, Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans wrote her first letter to Paul Laurence Dunbar in Dayton. She was 19 years old and he was 22, and they were at the beginning of a lengthy correspondence that would eventually lead to marriage. Alice was responding to a letter and some poems Paul had sent her three weeks earlier, but she gave a good excuse for her tardy reply.
Your letter was handed to me at a singularly inopportune moment -- the house was on fire. So I laid it down, not knowing what it was and I must confess not caring very much. I found it laid in my desk and read it somewheres about ten days later and those dainty little verses have been ringing in my head ever since. I must thank you ever so much and though I don't like to appear greedy, still if you have any more like them, please send them down this way. Your name is quite familiar to me from seeing your poems in different papers. I always enjoyed them very much. I am sorry to say that I have done very little. It seems I cannot possibly find time to write when I want. I have a little collection of short stories -- a small book -- in press now. I suppose you'll take a copy. I shall be pleased to hear from you soon and often.
Alice Ruth Moore to Paul Laurence Dunbar, May 7, 1895. Paul Laurence Dunbar Papers, Ohio History Connection (Microfilm edition, Roll 1).
Despite her humility, Alice was very active as a writer and her work had been published in many periodicals. The "little collection" she referred to was her first book, Violets and Other Tales, a volume of stories, poems and essays released during the summer of 1895. Alice and her publisher provided copies of the book to newspapers around the country and she accumulated a scrapbook of reviews from Louisiana, Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Texas, Nebraska and New York.
A book of Miss Moore's which has just been issued, entitled "Violets and Other Tales," gives direct evidence of the ability of the young author. The volume contains prose sketches and poems which indicate artistic quality of a high standard. She not only has great delicacy of perception, but admirable powers of description, and lends to all her conceptions the attraction of originality of expression. In addition to Miss Moore's literary work, she is a teacher in one of the large public schools of New Orleans, and also teaches shorthand and typewriting at home, besides contributing articles, sketches and poems regularly to the New York Age, the Woman's Era of Boston, the Journal of the Lodge of New Orleans, the Monthly Review of Boston, the Colored American of Washington, D. C., and other race journals. She is generally considered the ablest writer for the public press among the colored women of the United States.
"A Southern Authoress." Daily Standard (Boston, Massachusetts). July 27, 1895.
The little volume reflects great credit upon its versatile author, and will be read with delight by the thousands of Miss Moore's admirers all over the country.
"Violets and Other Tales." Journal of the Lodge (New Orleans, Louisiana). July 27, 1895.
The handsome little volume of poems and stories by Miss Alice Ruth Moore -- the bright new star in the Southern sky -- is a little gem. The book is unique and decidedly interesting and the stories are well told. There is a warmth and vigor of imagination, and a fervid abandon to emotion, characteristic of Miss Moore and of the South. All her lovers love, her heroines are fond of kisses; they do not shrink from a good hearty hug even if it does crush their sleeves, and when their heroes prove fickle or false, life has lost its charms. All this is natural with an ardent gifted Southern girl, scarce out of her teens: and it does not hinder one from reading between the lines, words of splendid promise for the future, if the coming years are devoted to earnest, patient, judicious study. She unquestionably possesses talent of a high order -- her power of expression is marvelous.
"Violets and Other Tales," by Charles S. Morris. The Monthly Review (Boston, Massachusetts). July 1895.
One article indirectly compared Alice's writing ability to that of Paul's. The reviewer praised Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century poet and enslaved person, implying that nineteenth-century Black writers (like Alice) were not as talented as Wheatley, but that Paul came close.
During the past week I have received four volumes of verse written by Afro-Americans, none of whom is as genuinely African as Phillis was, and all of whom have enjoyed more opportunities for culture than she, and lived in a happier condition and under brighter skies. They should have a finer touch, a tenderer sympathy, a better mastery of the machinery of versification, a truer insight into nature and nature's god, than the African slave girl who lived and thought and wrote one hundred and twenty-two years ago. She struck the keynote in verse for her race, when it was still an infant on this continent, a child as she was in all things, and no one, except it be Paul Laurence Dunbar, has approached her in imaginative power, in mastery of language and of poetic expression.
Alice Ruth Moore, a New Orleans school teacher just out of her teens, has just published a small volume of prose and verse, in which there are many choice bits of sentiment.
"Some Afro-American Verse" by T. Thomas Fortune. The Sun (New York, New York. October 6, 1895. Page 15.