1782-00-00: (Antoine Dupré, Born in Cap-Haïtien, One of Haiti’s First Published Poets and Playwrights, Whose Historical Melodramas Celebrated the Revolution …

1782-00-00: (Antoine Dupré, Born in Cap-Haïtien, One of Haiti’s First Published Poets and Playwrights, Whose Historical Melodramas Celebrated the Revolution in French Literary Forms, Killed in a Duel at Thirty-Three): Antoine Dupré was born in 1782 in Cap-Haïtien and became one of Haiti’s earliest published poets and playwrights. The Revolution had ended the era of French traveling theater companies performing European plays in colonial Saint-Domingue, and into that void stepped a new generation of writers whose subject was the one story that mattered most: the heroism and glory of the struggle for independence. Dupré’s plays, such as La Mort de Général Lamarre, were historical melodramas in the French romantic style, works that used the literary conventions of the colonizer to celebrate the colonizer’s defeat. He was part of a cohort that included Milscent and Ignace Nau, writers who collectively established the first tradition of Haitian national literature. Dupré was killed in a duel on January 13, 1816, at the age of thirty-three. His short life coincided almost exactly with the first years of Haitian independence, and his art was an attempt to give that independence a voice.