Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896). The dialect poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar’s canon, which is replete with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems. In its entirety, Dunbar’s literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in the turn-of-the-century United States.

Dunbar began showing literary promise while still in high school in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived with his widowed mother. The only African American in his class, he became president of the school literary society, editor-in-chief of the school paper, and class poet. By 1889, two years before he graduated, he had already published poems in the Dayton Herald and worked as an editor of the short-lived Dayton Tattler, a Black newspaper. Although their names are not listed in the publication, Dunbar's classmate, Orville Wright, and Wright's brother Wilbur, printed the newspaper.

Dunbar aspired to a career in law, but his mother’s financial situation precluded a university education. He consequently sought employment with various Dayton businesses, only to be rejected because of his race. He finally found work as an elevator operator, a job that allowed him time to continue writing. At this time, Dunbar produced articles, short stories, and poems, including several in the dialect style that later earned him fame.

In 1892, one of his former teachers invited Dunbar to address the Western Association of Writers convening in Dayton. At the meeting, Dunbar befriended James Newton Matthews, who subsequently praised Dunbar’s work in a letter to an Illinois newspaper. Newspapers throughout the country reprinted the letter, bringing Dunbar recognition outside Dayton. Among the readers of this letter was a lover of Matthews, poet James Whitcomb Riley, who then familiarized himself with Dunbar’s work and wrote him a commendatory letter. 

Bolstered by the support of both Matthews and Riley, Dunbar decided to publish a collection of his poems. He obtained additional assistance from Orville Wright and then self-published with United Brethren Publishing, a Dayton firm that eventually printed Oak and Ivy (1893) for 125 dollars. The publishers loaned the sum to Dunbar, who was earning four dollars a week at the time. In Oak and Ivy, Dunbar included his earliest dialect poems as well as many other pieces. Among the latter is one of his most popular poems, “Sympathy,” in which he expresses, in a somber tone, the plight of Black people in American society.

Shortly after the publication of Oak and Ivy, attorney Charles A. Thatcher approached Dunbar and offered to fund his college education. Dunbar, however, rejected Thatcher to pursue a literary career because of the promising sales of Oak and Ivy. Thatcher then applied himself to promoting Dunbar in nearby Toledo, Ohio, and helped him obtain work there reading his poetry at libraries and literary gatherings. Dunbar also found unexpected support from psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey, who helped distribute Oak and Ivy in Toledo and occasionally sent Dunbar much-needed financial aid.

Tobey teamed with Thatcher to publish Dunbar’s second verse collection, Majors and Minors. For this book, Dunbar produced poems on a variety of themes and in several styles. The dialect verse found greater favor with his predominantly white readership and Dunbar gained increasing fame. Instrumental to Dunbar’s growing popularity was a highly positive though extremely patronizing review by eminent realist writer and literary critic William Dean Howells. In Harper’s Weekly, Howells praised Dunbar as “the first man of his color to study his race objectively” and commended the dialect poems as faithful representations of Black speech. Critics believe Howell’s applause also had a chilling effect on Dunbar’s legacy, as the fervent discussion around Dunbar’s dialect poems precluded a comprehensive study of his oeuvre.

Through Thatcher and Tobey, Dunbar met an agent and secured more public readings and a publishing contract. He then published Lyrics of Lowly Life, a poetry collection derived primarily from verse already featured in Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors. This new volume sold impressively across the country. On the strength of his recent acclaim, Dunbar commenced a six-month reading tour of England. There he found publishers for a British edition of Lyrics of Lowly Life and befriended musician Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with Samuel Taylor Coleridge), with whom he collaborated on the operetta Dream Lovers.

When Dunbar returned to the United States in 1897, he obtained a clerkship at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Although his health suffered during the two years he lived there, the period nonetheless proved fruitful for Dunbar. In 1898, he published his first short story collection, Folks From Dixie (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), in which he delineated the situation of African Americans in both the pre-and post-emancipation United States. Although these tales, unlike some of his dialect verse, were often harsh examinations of racial prejudice, Folks From Dixie was well received upon publication.

At the end of 1898, his health degenerating still further, Dunbar left the Library of Congress and commenced another reading tour. In 1899, he published another verse collection, Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dodd, Mead and Company), which was well-received by critics. However, in the spring of that year, his health lapsed. Ill with pneumonia, the already tubercular Dunbar was advised to rest in the mountains. He moved to the Catskills in New York State but continued to write while recovering.

After a brief stay in Colorado in 1900, Dunbar returned to Washington, D.C. Shortly before his return, he published another collection of tales, The Strength of Gideon (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1900), in which he continued to recount Black life both before and after slavery. Reviewers at the time favored his pre-emancipation stories, which were seen as humorous and sentimental, and ignored work that detailed volatile accounts of abuse and injustice.

Dunbar followed The Strength of Gideon with his second novel, The Love of Landry (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1900), about an ailing woman who arrives in Colorado for convalescence and finds true happiness with a cowboy. Like his first novel, TheUncalled (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898),The Love of Landry was dismissed by critics. Dunbar suffered a further critical setback with his next novel, The Fanatics (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1901), about the United States at the beginning of the Civil War. The novel’s central characters are from white families who differ in their North-South sympathies and spark a dispute in their Ohio community. The Fanatics was a commercial failure upon publication. The Sport of the Gods (1902), Dunbar’s final novel, which featured racist violence perpetrated by police officers and other white characters, presented a far more critical and disturbing portrait of Black America.

Although its acclaim was hardly unanimous, The Sport of the Gods earned substantial praise as a powerful novel of protest. By this time, however, Dunbar was experiencing considerable turmoil in his own life. Prior to writing The Sport of the Gods, he suffered another lapse of poor health, compounded by alcoholism. The same year The Sport of the Gods was published, he separated from his wife of four years, writerAlice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. The next year, following a nervous breakdown and another bout of pneumonia, Dunbar assembled another verse collection, Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dodd, Mead, 1903), and another short story collection, In Old Plantation Days (Dodd Mead & Company,1903).In Old Plantation Days includes 25 stories set on a southern plantation during the days of slavery. Dunbar’s stories drew the ire of many critics for their stereotyped characters, and some of his detractors went so far as to allege that he contributed to racist concepts while appearing to disdain such thinking.

Though he continued to write and publish, Dunbar’s health declined further. Relying on alcohol to temper his chronic coughing only exacerbated his illness. During the last three years of his life, he lived with his mother in Dayton, Ohio. He died February 9, 1906, at age 33.

In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar’s standing as the foremost Black American poet seemed assured, and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements in African American literature. In the ensuing decades, however, scholars questioning the validity of his often stereotypic characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to sustain an anti-racist stance damaged his reputation. More recently, Dunbar’s stature has risen, and poems that did not receive much attention during his lifetime are now prized as some of his greatest achievements in verse. 

Modern champions include Addison Gayle Jr., whose Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Doubleday, 1971), is considered a key contribution to Dunbar studies, and Nikki Giovanni, whose contribution to A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1975) hails Dunbar as “a natural resource of our people.” For Giovanni, as for other Dunbar scholars, Dunbar’s work constitutes both a history and a celebration of Black life. “There is no poet, black or nonblack, who measures his achievement,” she declares. “Even today. He wanted to be a writer and he wrote.”