Paul Laurence Dunbar

Who Was Paul Laurence Dunbar?

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African American poet to achieve national prominence in American literary culture — a writer whose dialect poems brought him wide popular success and whose standard English poems, less celebrated in his lifetime, constitute one of the most important and most overlooked bodies of lyric poetry in American literature. Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, the son of formerly enslaved parents, he was the only Black student in his high school class and edited the school newspaper before poverty forced him to work as an elevator operator while writing poetry in his spare time.

William Dean Howells’s influential review of his second collection, Majors and Minors (1895), brought him national attention, and his Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), with a preface by Howells, made him famous. But Howells’s preference for the dialect poems — poems that rendered the speech of the rural Black South — over the standard English poems shaped Dunbar’s reception in ways that haunted him for the rest of his life.

Dunbar is significant for TLA because his work raises, with unusual directness, the question of the mask — the performance of a self that the surrounding culture will accept, at the cost of the self that one actually is. His poem “We Wear the Mask” is the most compressed and most devastating account of this condition in American poetry.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Oak and Ivy — 1893
• Majors and Minors — 1895
• Lyrics of Lowly Life — 1896
• Lyrics of the Hearthside — 1899
• The Sport of the Gods — 1902 — novel
• Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow — 1905