35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Paul Laurence Dunbar 

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a brilliant, popular poet, beloved by the Black community, who put his experiences into lyrical language. He was one of the first Black poets to become nationally recognized by white America. 

Even early on, Dunbar was seen as a Black prodigy in a white world. He was the only  African American in his Dayton, Ohio, high school class, but he was immensely popular. In his senior year, he was elected president of the literary society and served as editor of the school newspaper. 

Dunbar took one of the few jobs available to a young Black man at the time, operating an elevator. He continued writing poems and sending them off to publications. 

In 1893, he paid to have 56 poems published in a slim volume called Oak and Ivy, which he sold to his captive audience of elevator passengers. Thinking there would be opportunities available at the World's Fair of 1893, Dunbar moved to Chicago, where he became Frederick Douglass's clerical assistant. 

In 1895, Dunbar was able to pay to publish a second collection of his verses, called Majors and Minors, which presented poems he had written in standard English and in Black dialect. The book became his major breakthrough after being favorably reviewed by William Dean Howells, reigning literary critic of the day for Harper's Weekly. 

Howells encouraged Dunbar to take the best poems from his two books and reissue them in 1896 under the title Lyrics of Lowly Life, for which Howells wrote the preface. The book made Dunbar a star in white literary circles and gave him the financial security to write full-time. 

Offers streamed in from prestigious magazines and publishers for anything that came from his pen, and Dunbar didn't disappoint, turning out a great amount of work, including four novels, four volumes of short stories, and three more books of poetry. 

Because of the necessity of surviving financially in the literary world, Dunbar compromised his art. Although he preferred to write verse in standard English, he wrote uninspired prose and poems in Black dialect, which his readers seemed to prefer. Despite his success, Dunbar was riddled with disappointment that his greatest works had gone unappreciated. 

However, when Dunbar died from tuberculosis on February 9, 1906, at the age of 33, the American public widely considered him the dean of Black poets.

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.