Irwin Russell (1853 - 1879)

Irwin Russell was born on June 3, 1853, in Port Gibson, Mississippi. He was admitted to the bar at the remarkably young age of nineteen. As a child, Russell had been drawn to the dialect poetry of Robert Burns, and he began writing his own dialect verse. He experimented with representation of southern poor white, English, and Irish speech, but it was ultimately his treatment of African American pronunciation and idiom that secured his importance to post-Reconstruction southern writing.