Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, on the twenty-seventh of June 1872, the son of Joshua Dunbar — a formerly enslaved man who had escaped to Canada and served in the Union Army during the Civil War — and Matilda Murphy. He was the only Black student in his Dayton high school. He was elected class president, edited the school newspaper, and was the class poet at graduation in 1891.

He published his first poetry collection, Oak and Ivy, in 1893 at twenty-one — financing the publication himself, then selling copies from the elevator he operated to support his family. The book was reviewed favorably by William Dean Howells, the dean of American literary criticism, in Harper's Weekly (1896); the review made Dunbar's national reputation overnight. He became the first African American poet to achieve national reputation in American letters.

He produced, over the next twelve years, twelve volumes of poetry, four novels, four collections of short stories, several librettos, and the lyrics to the Black-led 1898 Broadway musical Clorindy: The Origin of the Cake Walk. His work moved between Standard English and the Black vernacular dialect of the American South — the latter, which made his contemporary reputation, has been seen by subsequent critics as both his achievement and the constraint that nineteenth-century American literary culture imposed on him.

He died of tuberculosis at his mother's home in Dayton on the ninth of February 1906, age thirty-three.

He is honored here as the first African American poet to achieve national American literary reputation.