Paul Laurence Dunbar

Dunbar, Paul Laurence (1872–1906), poet, fiction writer, essayist, songwriter, linguistic innovator, and prophet. Paul Laurence Dunbar published in such mainstream journals as Century, Lipincott's Monthly, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Saturday Evening Post. A gifted poet and a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance, Dunbar was read by both blacks and whites in turn-of-the-century America.

Dunbar, the son of two former slaves, was born in Dayton, Ohio, and attended the public schools of that city. He was taught to read by his mother, Matilda Murphy Dunbar, and he absorbed her homespun wisdom as well as the stories told to him by his father, Joshua Dunbar, who had escaped from enslavement in Kentucky and served in the Massachusetts 55th Regiment during the Civil War. Thus, while Paul Laurence Dunbar himself was never enslaved, he was one of the last of a generation to have ongoing contact with those who had been. Dunbar was steeped in the oral tradition during his formative years and he would go on to become a powerful interpreter of the African American folk experience in literature and song; he would also champion the cause of civil rights and higher education for African Americans in essays and poetry that were militant by the standards of his day.

During his years at Dayton's Central High, Dunbar was the school's only student of color, but it was his scholarly performance that distinguished him. He served as editor in chief of the school paper, president of the literary society, and class poet. His poetry grew more sophisticated with his repeated readings of John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Burns; later he would add American poets John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Whitcomb Riley to his list of favorites as he searched ardently for his own poetic voice. But it was his reading of Irwin Russell and other writers in the plantation tradition that led him into difficulty as he searched for an authentic poetic diction that would incorporate the voices of his parents and the stories they told.

After graduating from high school in 1891, racial discrimination forced Dunbar to accept a job as an elevator operator in a Dayton hotel. He wrote on the job during slack hours. He became well known as the “elevator boy poet” after James Newton Mathews invited him to read his poetry at the annual meeting of the Western Association of Writers, held in Dayton in 1892.

In 1893 Dunbar published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy, on the press of the Church of the Brethren. That same year he also attended the World's Columbian Exposition, where he sold copies of his book and gained the patronage of Frederick Douglass and other influential African Americans.

In 1895 Dunbar initiated a correspondence with Alice Ruth Moore, a fair-skinned black Creole teacher and writer originally from New Orleans. Three years later he married Alice in secret and over the objections of her friends and family. During the years of their marriage, Dunbar began to suffer from tuberculosis and the alcohol prescribed for it. The Dunbars separated permanently in 1902 but remained friends, and Alice continued to be known as “the widow of Paul Laurence Dunbar” even after her 1916 marriage to publisher Robert J. Nelson. The Dunbars had no children.

Dunbar published eleven volumes of poetry including Oak and Ivy (1893), Majors and Minors (1895), Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899), Poems of Cabin and Field (1899), Candle-Lightin’ Time (1901), Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903), When Malindy Sings (1903), Li’l Gal (1904), Howdy, Honey, Howdy (1905), and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905). Dunbar's so-called Complete Poems were published posthumously in 1913. The most complete edition of Dunbar's poetry, The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, containing a selection of sixty poems not published in 1913, did not appear until 1994. Dunbar's published fiction includes The Uncalled (1898), Folks from Dixie (1898), The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (1900), The Fanatics (1901), and The Sport of the Gods (1902), but he remains best known for his poetry.

Much of the controversy surrounding Paul Laurence Dunbar concerns his dialect poetry, wherein some scholars, such as the late Charles T. Davis, felt that Dunbar showed the greatest glimmers of genius. Sterling A. Brown, writing in Negro Poetry and Drama in 1937, asserted that Dunbar was the first American poet to “handle Negro folk life with any degree of fullness” but he also found Dunbar guilty of cruelly “misreading” black history. This points to the basic flaw in Paul Laurence Dunbar's attempts to represent authentic African American folk language in verse. He was not able to transcend completely the racist plantation tradition made popular by Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Irwin Russell, and other white writers who made use of African American folk materials and who showed the “old time Negro” as if he were satisfied serving the master on the antebellum plantation.

While Dunbar sought an appropriate literary form for the representation of African American vernacular expression, he was also deeply ambivalent about his undertaking in this area. He recognized that many of his experiments yielded imperfect results and he was concerned that prominent white critics such as William Dean Howells praised his work for the wrong reasons, setting a tone that other Dunbar critics would follow for years as they virtually ignored his standard English verse and his published experiments with Irish, German, and Western regional dialects.

Some African American critics saw a concession to racism evident in Dunbar's black dialect poetry, and while it is unlikely that any perceived concession was intentional, it can certainly be argued that dialect poems like “Parted” and “Corn Song” were more derivative of the plantation school than they were original productions of African American genius. Yet, during his lifetime, Dunbar's work was praised by Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others.

Negative treatment of Dunbar's poetry by black critics including scholar-poet James Weldon Johnson did not surface fully until the New Negro movement of the 1920s. On the other hand, poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes publicly admired and emulated Dunbar. A considered reading of poems like “We Wear the Mask”, “When Malindy Sings”, “Frederick Douglass”, “The Colored Soldiers”, or “The Haunted Oak” affirms Dunbar's loyalty to the black race and his pride in its achievements, as well as his righteous anger over racial injustice.

In the second half of the twentieth century Paul Laurence Dunbar was rediscovered. In 1972 centenary conferences marking the hundredth anniversary of Dunbar's birth were held at the University of Dayton and the University of California at Irvine, with prominent black poets and writers in attendance. At the Irvine conference, poet Nikki Giovanni suggested that Dunbar's “message is clear and available…if we invest in Dunbar the integrity we hope others will give us.”

A new edition of Dunbar's poems subsequently put long out-of-print Dunbar poems back on the classroom shelf, making it possible for teachers to acquaint a new generation of poets and scholars with Dunbar's work.

[See also Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore.]

Bibliography

• Addison Gayle, Jr., Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1971.
• Jay Martin, ed., A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1975.
• Jay Martin and
• Gossie Hudson, eds., Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader, 1975.
• Peter Revell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1979.
• Marcellus Blount, “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance,” PMLA 107 (May 1992): 582–593.
• Joanne M. Braxton, ed., The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1993

Joanne M. Braxton

(click to enlarge)
Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1906. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born June 27, 1872, Dayton, Ohio, U.S. — died Feb. 9, 1906, Dayton) U.S. author. The son of former slaves, Dunbar became the first African American writer to try to live by his writings and one of the first to attain national prominence. He wrote for a largely white readership, using black dialect and depicting the pre-Civil War South in pastoral, idyllic tones. His verse collections include Oak and Ivy (1893), Majors and Minors (1895), and Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). His poems reached a wide readership, and he gave readings in the U.S. and England. He also published four short-story collections and four novels, including The Sport of the Gods (1902).

For more information on Paul Laurence Dunbar, visit Britannica.com.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence (1872–1906), librettist, lyricist, and author. Most famous as an early African‐American poet and novelist, he was also an important figure in the development of black musical theatre. In 1898 he wrote the libretto and lyrics for the first major black musical to play a first‐class white house, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cake Walk, although the entertainment was not a full‐length show and the house was the Casino's summer roof garden. But Dunbar also served as lyricist for In Dahomey (1903), the first full‐length black musical to play a standard Broadway theatre. He also wrote lyrics for several songs that were interpolated into other musicals.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), poet and novelist, was the first African American author to gain national recognition and a wide popular audience.

Born the son of a former slave in Dayton, Ohio, Paul Laurence Dunbar achieved a formal education through high school, graduating in 1891. He had served as editor of the school paper and as class poet. Unable to go to college, Dunbar worked as an elevator operator. He published his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy, in 1893 at his own expense, and his second, Majors and Minors, 2 years later. Seeing the second book, William Dean Howells, then one of America's most distinguished literary critics, urged the young poet to concentrate on dialect verse.

With the publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life, for which Howells wrote a laudatory preface, Dunbar's professional career got an auspicious start. Demand for his work was soon sufficient to enable him to earn his living as a writer. He took Howell's advice to study the "moods and traits of his own race in its own accents of our English," so that his art was best shown in those "pieces which … described the range between appetite and emotion … which is the range of the race." (This was Howells's limited view of African Americans.)

Dunbar wanted to satisfy the popular taste for the light, romantic, comic, and sentimental. His short stories, which began appearing in popular magazines in the 1890s, usually depict African American folk characters, Southern scenes, and humorous situations. His first novel, The Uncalled (1898), like two of the three that followed - The Love of Landry (1900) and The Fanatics (1901) - is a sentimental tale about white people. These novels are competent but undistinguished. His last long fiction, The Sport of the Gods (1902), is notable only for his failure to realize the potential in the story of an agrarian African American family's urbanization.

In 1898 Dunbar married Alice Moore; the marriage was unhappy, and the couple separated in 1901, when Dunbar went to Washington, D.C., as a consultant to the Library of Congress. He was unhappy with his writing too. At about this time he confided to a friend, "I see now very clearly that Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse."

Dunbar had contracted tuberculosis and tried all the "cures"; alcohol brought temporary relief, and he became addicted. He continued to turn out short stories and poems. Sick, and discouraged by the lukewarm reception of The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904), a collection of short stories, and of Lyrics of Love and Sunshine (1905), which contains some of his best verses in pure English, he returned to Dayton, where he died on Feb. 9, 1906. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913; still in print) shows how well he succeeded in capturing many aspects of African American life.

Further Reading

Two full-length biographies of Dunbar are Benjamin Brawley, Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People (1936), and the better-balanced Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song (1947) by Virginia Cunningham. Jean Gould, That Dunbar Boy (1958), is for children. Dunbar gets brief treatment in Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, Negro Caravan (1941); Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948); and James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, Dark Symphony (1968).

poet; short story writer; novelist; librettist

Personal Information

Born June 27, 1872, in Dayton, OH; died of tuberculosis, February 9, 1906, in Dayton, OH; son of Joshua (a former slave, soldier, and plasterer) and Matilda Glass (a former slave and laundress; maiden name, Burton) Dunbar; married Alice Ruth Moore (a writer and teacher), March 6, 1898.

Career

Writer, 1890-1906. Worked as elevator operator; editor of Dayton Tattler, 1890; court messenger, 1896; assistant clerk at Library of Congress in Washington, DC, 1897-98. Also gave numerous readings of poetry and fiction in the United States and England.

Life's Work

Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first important black poets in American literature and the first black American to achieve an international audience for his work. Best known for his poems in dialect, Dunbar became a sought-after writer at the turn of the century, popular with black and white audiences alike. During his brief life, this self-educated author published an astonishing number of poems, short stories, and novels, and he wrote song lyrics for stage shows as well. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Doris Lucas Laryea claimed that Dunbar "was a poet of genuine imagination who rose to literary fame despite nearly insurmountable obstacles.... His poems and stories picture the hopeful, sensuous, and joyous side of working-class black life as well as its sorrows and disillusionments. Few American poets before him attracted such a wide, diversified group of readers and held them for such a long, unbroken period of time. He lifted the black oral tradition to the height of art and looked at his people objectively and with pride."

The high level of recognition that Dunbar received in his lifetime did not necessarily satisfy him. He felt confined by the overwhelming popularity of his dialect poems and struggled in his later years with the gnawing notion that he had never reached his potential as a serious artist. Indeed, his literary reputation suffered at mid-century, when critics accused him of sentimentalizing plantation slavery and presenting negative stereotypes in his works.

Subsequent generations have rescued Dunbar from obscurity and accorded him a new measure of respect. Poet Nikki Giovanni, for instance, hailed Dunbar as "a natural resource of our people" in the book A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Giovanni added: "There is no poet, black or nonblack, who measures his achievement. Even today. He wanted to be a writer and he wrote."

The son of former slaves, Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1872. He grew up listening to the stories his parents told about their days in slavery and how that time compared to post-Reconstruction days. Dunbar's father, who was in his fifties when Paul was born, had escaped to Canada by the Underground Railroad as a young man and later fought with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War. Dunbar's mother had been a house servant on a Kentucky plantation before moving to Dayton to be near relatives. The marriage of Matilda and Joshua Dunbar was brief, beginning just before Paul's birth and ending when the child was less than two years old. Nevertheless, the impressionable youngster enjoyed close relationships with both parents, especially his mother. It was their recollections that the poet would draw upon time after time in his pieces about plantation life.

Dunbar was the only black in his high school class. Far from being ostracized, however, he was immensely popular--he was elected president of the senior class, served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, and was named class poet. By that time Dunbar had already begun to write regularly. He desperately wanted to be a journalist and a poet, but his father had died, and his mother could hardly make ends meet as a laundress. College was out of the question, and when he made the rounds of the local newspapers looking for a job he was turned away. Dunbar did not lose faith, though, because the newspapers in the region, most often the Dayton Herald, published his poems on occasion.

Shortly after graduating from high school, Dunbar founded his own newspaper, the Dayton Tattler, for black residents of the area. The newspaper was printed by his high school friend, Orville Wright, who would later achieve fame as inventor of the airplane. Unfortunately, Dunbar could not make a financial success of the Dayton Tattler, and the publication folded in a short time. The frustrated would-be writer was thrown back into the working world, where he could find only menial jobs.

Dunbar found work in a downtown office building as an elevator operator. There, between calls, he read books and made notes for poems and articles that would later be published in midwestern newspapers. Dunbar was not usually paid for his published pieces, but he persisted in the faith that some day he would profit from his writing. The first work he sold was a Western tale entitled "The Tenderfoot." He earned six dollars for the story--a princely sum considering that he made just four dollars a week operating the elevator.

In June of 1892, the Western Association of Writers met in Dayton. One of the members, a former teacher of Dunbar's, invited Dunbar to give a welcoming address to the group. He composed a 26-line poem for the occasion; his work so stirred the audience that he was invited to join the association. At that same meeting he met James Newton Matthews, a white author who helped increase the audience for his work. A letter that Matthews wrote about Dunbar was published in newspapers across the country, bringing Dunbar to the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, one of the foremost American poets of the day. Together Matthews and Riley encouraged the young poet to continue writing, and they suggested he try to publish a volume of his verse.

Late in 1892, Dunbar located a publisher for his first book. The United Brethren Publishing House in Dayton agreed to print a volume of his poetry for $125, allowing him to pay in installments from the proceeds of book sales. 500 copies of Oak and Ivy, Dunbar's first book, were delivered to him in December of 1892. They sold for one dollar per copy, and within two weeks Dunbar had sold enough books to pay his debt with the publisher. Oak and Ivy contained Dunbar's first dialect poems, as well as one of his most famous standard-English works, "Sympathy," which included the lines: "I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,/ When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,/ When he beats his bars and he would be free."

Soon after the debut of Oak and Ivy, Dunbar met a wealthy Toledo lawyer named Charles A. Thatcher. Thatcher, who would be a major patron and supporter through the rest of Dunbar's career, offered to send him to college. The poet regretfully declined the offer, because he had to support his mother. In fact, through his reading and persistent writing, Dunbar had effectively educated himself. He was also earning money as a writer. He gave poetry readings throughout Ohio, and sold his books to the audiences who attended them. A brief sojourn to Chicago brought friendships with Frederick Douglass and a number of aspiring black poets, both male and female.

Prior to 1896, Dunbar was merely a regional writer--still unable to support himself with the proceeds of his creative work. That changed with the publication of a second volume of poetry, Majors and Minors. A growing group of influential friends directed this work to the attention of William Dean Howells, a renowned novelist and critic. Howells gave Majors and Minors an enthusiastically favorable review in the June 27, 1896, issue of Harper's Weekly, with special acclaim for the dialect poems that Dunbar had grouped together as the "Minors." If Dunbar had labored in near anonymity before, he would do it no longer. By the end of 1896, he had embarked on a national reading tour and had received a handsome advance of $400 from a major publisher for his third poetry collection.

Lyrics of Lowly Life, published late in 1896, remains Dunbar's best-known work. The book contains 105 poems, many of them reprints from Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors. The work sold well in the United States and was subsequently published in England as well. Dunbar visited England for six months, reading his poetry on the lecture circuit there and collaborating on musical numbers with black musician Samuel Coleridge Taylor. When he returned, he was nearly a celebrity. He was given a job as a clerk in the reading room at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and he travelled often to give readings and to meet with the other prominent black citizens of his day. In 1898, he married author and teacher Alice Ruth Moore.

Financially secure at last, Dunbar continued publishing at a prodigious pace, even though his health was not good. His output of poetry slackened, but he began writing more fiction. Lucas Laryea suggested that Dunbar turned to stories and novels "to present an enlarged perception of the tragic dilemma of the black American. Prose helped to free him of the yoke that bound him as a dialect poet." Whatever the case, Dunbar's fiction did not prove as popular as his poetry, especially his dialect poetry, which was often compared to the Hoosier dialect work of James Whitcomb Riley.

The busy round of travel and work took a toll on Dunbar's already frail health. He contracted pneumonia in the spring of 1899, and that illness accelerated his tuberculosis. At the request of his doctors, Dunbar left Washington, D.C. for a lengthy convalescence in the Catskill Mountains and Colorado Springs, Colorado. His popularity was at its highest during that time. Lyrics of Lowly Life alone had sold some 12,000 copies, and another work, Poems of Cabin and Field, had sold 5,000 copies in less than one year. Lucas Laryea noted: "At the turn of the twentieth century, Dunbar was America's most notable black poet, and he was quite prosperous.... There was a constant flow of requests for his works from such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Lippincott's, and Century. "

Between 1898 and 1903, Dunbar published three short story collections and three novels. The novels failed to find large audiences, but the stories--including protest pieces set in both the North and the South--were widely read at the time. Dunbar's earliest stories and novels were romantic, often sentimental tales of plantation life or unlikely love affairs. As he aged, the author began tackling more pressing issues, such as prejudice, lynching, personal morality, Jim Crow laws that legally sanctioned racial discrimination, and the overwhelming pressures faced by blacks in a predominantly white society.

Dunbar felt that he himself had succumbed to those pressures. Writing for a white audience, he had produced the dialect poems that made him famous. These were, to his mind, mostly inferior to his standard English poems and not truly representative of his talent. Dunbar grew increasingly embittered about this as he grew more and more infirm.

His last novel, The Sport of the Gods, published in 1902, became one of his most impassioned attempts to protest the injustices of American society. Lucas Laryea explained that in Dunbar's novels, especially The Sport of the Gods, the black man "emerges as a new man fully capable of devising the means by which he can ameliorate his social and economic paralysis. Dunbar's depictions depart from the myth that blacks were contented with slavery and that they did not know what to do with freedom once they found it."

As Dunbar's health deteriorated he began to drink heavily. Separated from his wife, he spent the last years of his life with his mother in Dayton. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 33 and was mourned as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race." In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar's standing as America's foremost black poet seemed assured, and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements in black American literature. His reputation suffered a setback later in the twentieth century, when scholars accused him of stereotyping and sugar-coating the harsh realities of plantation life. A more positive evaluation has emerged in recent years, and Dunbar has been reappraised with more attention to the context of his times.

No amount of criticism can negate Dunbar's achievement, however. At a time when most blacks were consigned to society's most menial roles, he emerged as an artist of passion and intellect, a poet and prose stylist of renown. Lucas Laryea called the poet a "master craftsman" who "captured the humor, pathos, and hopeful spirit of a resolute and struggling people in and out of slavery." The critic concluded that Paul Laurence Dunbar remains "among the best poets this country has ever produced."

Works

Writings

• Poetry Oak and Ivy, Press of United Brethren Publishing House, 1893 (also see below).
• Majors and Minors, Hadley & Hadley, 1896 (also see below).
• Lyrics of Lowly Life (includes poems from Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors), Dodd, 1896, reprinted, Arno, 1969.
• Lyrics of the Hearthside, Dodd, 1899, reprinted, AMS Press, 1972.
• Poems of Cabin and Field, Dodd, 1899, reprinted, AMS Press, 1972.
• Candle-lightin' Time, Dodd, 1901, reprinted, AMS Press, 1972.
• Lyrics of Love and Laughter, Dodd, 1903.
• When Malindy Sings, Dodd, 1903, reprinted, AMS Press, 1972.
• Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, Dodd, 1905, reprinted, AMS Press, 1972.
• A Plantation Portrait, Dodd, 1905.
• Joggin' erlong, Dodd, 1906, reprinted, Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969.
• The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dodd, 1913, reprinted, 1980.
• Speakin' o' Christmas, and Other Christmas and Special Poems, Dodd, 1914, reprinted, AMS Press, 1975.
• Little Brown Baby: Poems for Young People, edited and with biographical sketch by Bertha Rodgers, illustrated by Erick Berry, Dodd, 1940, reprinted, 1966.
• I Greet the Dawn: Poems, Atheneum, 1978.
• Fiction The Uncalled (novel), Dodd, 1898, reprinted, AMS Press, 1972.
• Folks from Dixie (short stories), Dodd, 1898, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1969.
• The Love of Landry (novel), Dodd, 1900, reprinted, Literature House, 1970.
• The Strength of Gideon, and Other Stories, Dodd, 1900, reprinted, Arno, 1969.
• The Fanatics (novel), Dodd, 1901, reprinted, Literature House, 1970.
• The Sport of the Gods (novel), Dodd, 1902, reprinted, 1981.
• In Old Plantation Days (short stories), Dodd, 1903, reprinted, Negro Universities Press, 1969.
• The Heart of the Happy Hollow (short stories), Dodd, 1904, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1970.
• The Best Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dodd, 1938.
• Plays "Uncle Eph's Christmas" (one-act musical), produced in 1900.
• Also author of lyrics to songs in musical plays, such as "In Dahomey."

• The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, J. L. Nichols, 1907, reprinted, Kraus Reprint, 1971.
• The Letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar: A Private History (two volumes), University Microfilms, 1974.
• The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader, Dodd, 1975.
• Contributor to periodicals, including Bookman, Century, Detroit Free Press, Nation, and Saturday Evening Post.

Further Reading

Sources

• Black Literature Criticism, Volume 1, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers: A Collection of Sketches from "Contemporary Authors," Gale, 1989.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers before the Harlem Renaissance, Gale, 1986, Volume 54: American Poets, 1880-1945, Third Series, Gale, 1987, Volume 78: American Short-Story Writers, 1880-1910, Gale, 1989.
• Gayle, Addison, Jr., Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anchor/Doubleday, 1971.
• Martin, Jay, editor, A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dodd, 1975.
• Revell, Peter, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Twayne, 1979.
• Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1979, Volume 12, 1984.

— Anne Janette Johnson

Paul Laurence Dunbar
1897 sketch by Norman B. Wood
Born	June 27, 1872(1872-06-27) Dayton, Ohio, United States
Died	February 9, 1906 (aged 33) Dayton, Ohio
Cause of death	Tuberculosis
Resting place	Woodland Cemetery Dayton, Ohio
Nationality	American
Occupation	poet
Spouse(s)	Alice Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was a seminal American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life, one poem in the collection Ode to Ethiopia.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Usage of dialect 3 Publications 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery; his father was a veteran of the American Civil War, having served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment. His parents instilled in him a love of learning and history. He was a student at an all-white high school, Dayton Central High School, and he participated actively as a student. During high school, he was both the editor of the school newspaper and class president, as well as the president of the school literary society. Dunbar had also started the first African-American newsletter in Dayton.

He wrote his first poem at age 6 and gave his first public recital at age 9. Dunbar's first published work came in a newspaper put out by his high school friends Wilbur and Orville Wright, who owned a printing plant. The Wright Brothers later invested in the Dayton Tattler, a newspaper aimed at the black community, edited and published by Dunbar.

His first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1892 and attracted the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, the popular "Hoosier Poet". Both Riley and Dunbar wrote poems in both standard English and dialect. His second book, Majors and Minors (1895) brought him national fame and the patronage of William Dean Howells, the novelist and critic and editor of Harper's Weekly. After Howells' praise, his first two books were combined as Lyrics of Lowly Life and Dunbar started on a career of international literary fame. He moved to Washington, D.C., in the LeDroit Park neighborhood. While in Washington, he attended Howard University.

He kept a lifelong friendship with the Wrights, and was also associated with Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Brand Whitlock was also described as a close friend.^[1] He was honored with a ceremonial sword by President Theodore Roosevelt.

He wrote a dozen books of poetry, four books of short stories, five novels, and a play. He also wrote lyrics for In Dahomey - the first musical written and performed entirely by African-Americans to appear on Broadway in 1903; the musical comedy successfully toured England and America over a period of four years - one of the more successful theatrical productions of its time.^[2] His essays and poems were published widely in the leading journals of the day. His work appeared in Harper's Weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, the Denver Post, Current Literature and a number of other publications. During his life, considerable emphasis was laid on the fact that Dunbar was of pure black descent, with no white ancestors ever.

Dunbar's work is known for its colorful language and use of dialect, and a conversational tone, with a brilliant rhetorical structure.

Dunbar traveled to England in 1897 to recite his works on the London literary circuit. He met the brilliant young black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor who set some of his poems to music and who was influenced by Dunbar to use African and American Negro songs and tunes in future compositions.

After returning from England, Dunbar married Alice Ruth Moore in 1898. A graduate of Straight University (now Dillard University) in New Orleans, her most famous works include a short story entitled "Violets". She and her husband also wrote books of poetry as companion pieces. An account of their love, life and marriage was depicted in a play by Kathleen McGhee-Anderson titled Oak and Ivy.^[3]

Dunbar took a job at the Library of Congress in Washington. In 1900, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and moved to Colorado with his wife on the advice of his doctors. Dunbar and his wife separated in 1902, but they never divorced. Depression and declining health drove him to a dependence on alcohol, which further damaged his health. He moved back to Dayton to be with his mother in 1904. Dunbar died from tuberculosis on February 9, 1906, at age thirty-three.^[4] He was interred in the Woodland Cemetery in Dayton.^[5]

In 2002,Molefi Kete Asante listed Paul Laurence Dunbar on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[6]

Home of Paul Dunbar

Grave site and memorial.

1975 US Postage Stamp

Usage of dialect

Much of Dunbar's work was authored in conventional English, while some was rendered in African-American dialect. Dunbar remained always suspicious that there was something demeaning about the marketability of dialect poems:

“

I am tired, so tired of dialect. I send out graceful little poems, suited for any of the magazines, but they are returned to me by editors who say, Dunbar, but we do not care for the language compositions.

”

Two brief examples of Dunbar's work, the first in standard English and the second in dialect, demonstrate the diversity of the poet's production:

What dreams we have and how they fly

Like rosy clouds across the sky;

Of wealth, of fame, of sure success,

Of love that comes to cheer and bless;

And how they whither, how they fade,

The waning wealth, the jilting jade —

The fame that for a moment gleams,

Then flies forever, — dreams, ah — dreams!

(From Dreams)

"Sunshine on de medders,

Greenness on de way;

Dat's de blessed reason

I sing all de day."

Look hyeah! What you axing'?

What meks me so merry?

'Spect to see me sighin'

W'en hit's wa'm in Febawary?

(From A warm day in winter)

Publications

• L. K. Wiggins, compiler, Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1907)
• Complete Poetical Works, with W. D. Howells's introduction to "Lyrics of Lowly Life" (new impressions, New York, 1913)
• "The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Joanne M. Braxton, editor[1]

See also

• African American literature
• Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar House
• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor black composer

Places named in his honor

• Dunbar High School In various cities
• Dunbar Hospital (Detroit, Michigan)
• Dunbar Magnet Middle School (Little Rock, Arkansas)

References

1. ^ Paul Laurence, Printed Material
2. ^ Riis, Thomas L., Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915. (Smithsonian Institution Press: London, 1989) p. 91.
3. ^ St. Louis - Arts & Entertainment - Color Bind
4. ^ "Biography page at Paul Laurence Dunbar web site". University of Dayton. February 3, 2003. http://www.dunbarsite.org/biopld.asp. 
5. ^ Paul Laurence Dunbar at Find a Grave
6. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paul Laurence Dunbar

• Paul Laurence Dunbar poems at The Poetry Foundation
• Paul Laurence Dunbar: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
• Dunbar House state historical site, by the Ohio Historical Society
• Dunbar house is also part of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park which includes both the Wright Brothers bicycle shop and Dunbar's home (along with a bicycle the Wrights gave him).
• Wright State University's Paul Laurence Dunbar Library special collection
• University of Dayton's Paul Laurence Dunbar website
• Paul Laurence Dunbar Toledo's Attic Exhibit, contains an essay written by Dr. Timothy Messer-Kruse, then of the University of Toledo, as well as a short history of his writing career.
• Works by Paul Laurence Dunbar at Project Gutenberg
• The Life and Works of Paul Lawrence Dunbar by Lida Keck Wiggins, issued by Winston-Derek in 1992 ISBN 1-55523-473-9
• Dunbar's Legacy of Language, a 2006 NPR story marking the 100th anniversary of Dunbar's death; included is a poetry reading.

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