Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of parents who had escaped slavery in Kentucky, and was the only Black student in his high school class, where he nonetheless served as class president and edited the school newspaper; unable to afford college and shut out of professional work by his race, he supported himself for a time as an elevator operator while writing poetry. His second collection, Majors and Minors (1895), drew a glowing review from the eminent critic William Dean Howells that made Dunbar's national reputation almost overnight, though Howells's praise for Dunbar's dialect poems over his more numerous poems in standard English set a pattern of reception — and a tension over how a Black poet's work was read and marketed — that shadowed Dunbar's career and its later criticism. He went on to publish a dozen volumes of poetry along with novels, short-story collections, and song lyrics, becoming the first African American poet to earn a national literary reputation and a living from his writing. Ill for years with tuberculosis, he died in Dayton at thirty-three.