This is from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/paul-laurence-dunbar 1872–1906
Paul Laurence Dunbar was one the first influential
black poets in American literature. He enjoyed his
greatest popularity in the early twentieth century
following the publication of dialectic verse in
collections such as Majors and Minors and Lyrics
of Lowly Life. But the dialectic poems constitute
only a small portion of Dunbar's canon, which is replete
with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems in
standard English. In its entirety, Dunbar's literary body
has been acclaimed as an impressive representation of
black life in turn-of-the-century America. As Dunbar's
friend James Weldon Johnson noted in the preface to his Book
of American Poetry: "Paul Laurence Dunbar
stands out as the first poet from the Negro race in the
United States to show a combined mastery over poetic
material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary
distinction in what he wrote, and to maintain a high
level of performance. He was the first to rise to a
height from which he could take a perspective view of his
own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor,
its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel
sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its
aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary
form."
Dunbar began showing literary promise while still in high
school in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived with his widowed
mother. The only black in his class, he became class
president and class poet. By 1889, two years before he
graduated, he had already published poems in the Dayton
Herald and worked as editor of the short-lived Dayton
Tattler, a newspaper for blacks published by
classmate Orville Wright, who later gained fame with
brother Wilbur Wright as inventors of the airplane.
Dunbar aspired to a career in law, but his mother's
meager financial situation precluded his university
education. He consequently sought immediate employment
with various Dayton businesses, including newspapers,
only to be rejected because of his race. He finally
settled for 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 black-dialect style that later earned him
fame.
In 1892 Dunbar was invited by one of his former teachers
to address the Western Association of Writers then
convening in Dayton. At the meeting Dunbar befriended
James Newton Matthews, who subsequently praised Dunbar's
work in a letter to an Illinois newspaper. Matthews's
letter was eventually reprinted by newspapers throughout
the country and thus brought Dunbar recognition outside
Dayton. Among the readers of this letter was 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 solicited a Dayton firm, United Brethren Publishing,
that eventually printed the work, entitled Oak and
Ivy, for a modest sum.
In Oak and Ivy Dunbar included his earliest
dialect poems and many works in standard English. Among
the latter is one of his most popular poems,
"Sympathy," in which he expresses, in somber
tone, the dismal plight of blacks in American society. In
another standard English poem, "Ode to
Ethiopia," he records the many accomplishments of
black Americans and exhorts his fellow blacks to maintain
their pride despite racial abuse. The popularity of these
and other poems inspired Dunbar to devote himself more
fully to writing.
Shortly after the publication of Oak and Ivy
Dunbar was approached by attorney Charles A. Thatcher, an
admirer sympathetic to Dunbar's college education.
Dunbar, however, was greatly encouraged by sales of Oak
and Ivy and so rejected Thatcher to pursue a
literary career. 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 eventually teamed with Thatcher in publishing
Dunbar's second verse collection, Majors and Minors.
In this book Dunbar produced poems on a variety of themes
and in several styles. He grouped the more ambitious
poems, those written in standard English, under the
heading "Majors," and he gathered the more
superficial, dialect works as "Minors."
Although Dunbar invested himself most fully in his
standard poetry—which bore the influences of such
poets as the English romantics and Americans such as
Riley—it was the dialect verse that found greater
favor with his predominantly white readership, and it was
by virtue of these dialect poems that Dunbar gained
increasing fame throughout the country. Instrumental to
Dunbar's growing popularity was a highly positive, though
extremely patronizing, review by eminent novelist William
Dean Howells. Writing 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 the
black race.
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 America and
established Dunbar as the nation's foremost black poet.
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, with whom he then 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. Soon afterwards he married fellow writer
Alice Ruth Moore. Although his health suffered during the
two years he lived in Washington, the period nonetheless
proved fruitful for Dunbar. In 1898 he published his
first short story collection, Folks From Dixie,
in which he delineated the situation of blacks in both
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.
Not so Dunbar's first novel, The Uncalled, which
recalled Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
in probing the spiritual predicament of a minister.
Critics largely rejected The Uncalled as dull
and unconvincing in its portrait of Frederick Brent, a
pastor who had, in childhood, been abandoned by an
alcoholic father and then raised by a zealously devout
spinster, Hester Prime (Hawthorne's protagonist in The
Scarlet Letter was named Hester Prynne). After
securing a pastor's post, Brent alienated church-goers by
refusing to reproach an unwed mother. He resigns from his
pastorship and departs for Cincinnati. After further
misadventure—he ends his marriage engagement and
encounters his father, now a wandering
preacher—Brent finds fulfillment and happiness as
minister in another congregation.
At the end of 1898, his health degenerating still
further, Dunbar left the Library of Congress and
commenced another reading tour. He published another
verse collection, Lyrics of the Hearthside, and
recovered any status he may have jeopardized with The
Uncalled. In the spring of 1899, however, his health
lapsed sufficiently to threaten his life. Ill with
pneumonia, the already tubercular Dunbar was advised to
rest in the mountains. He therefore moved to the
Catskills in New York State, but he continued to write
while recovering from his ailments.
In 1900, after a brief stay in Colorado, Dunbar returned
to Washington, DC. Shortly before his return he published
another collection of tales, The Strength of Gideon,
in which he continued to recount black life both before
and after slavery. Reviewers at the time favored his
pre-emancipation stories full of humor and sentiment,
while ignoring more volatile accounts of abuse and
injustice. More recently these latter stories have gained
greater recognition from critics eager to substantiate
Dunbar's opposition to racism.
Dunbar followed The Strength of Gideon with his
second novel, The Love of Landry, about an
ailing woman who arrives in Colorado for convalescence
and finds true happiness with a cowboy. Like the earlier Uncalled,
The Love of Landry was deemed unconvincing in
its presentation of white characters and was dismissed as
inferior to Dunbar's tales of blacks. Dunbar suffered
further critical setback with his next novel, The
Fanatics, about America at the beginning of the
Civil War. Its 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, and in the
ensuing years it has continued to be regarded as a
superficial, largely uncompelling work. Among the novel's
many detractors is Robert Bone, who wrote in The
Negro in America that Dunbar resorted to
"caricature in his treatment of minor Negro
characters" and that his stereotypic portraits of
black characters only served to reinforce prejudice.
The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar's final novel,
presents a far more critical and disturbing portrait of
black America. The work centers on butler Berry Hamilton
and his family. After Berry is wrongly charged with theft
by his white employers, he is sentenced to ten years of
prison labor. His remaining family—wife, son, and
daughter—consequently find themselves targets of
abuse in their southern community, and after being robbed
by the local police they head north to Harlem. There they
encounter further hardship and strife: the son becomes
embroiled in the city's seamy nightlife and succumbs to
alcoholism and crime; the naive daughter is exploited by
fellow blacks and begins a questionable dancing career;
and the mother, convinced that her husband's prison
sentence has negated their marriage, weds an abusive
profligate. A happy resolution is achieved only after
Berry's accuser confesses, while dying, that his charge
was fabricated, whereupon Berry is released from prison.
He then travels north and finds his family in disarray.
But the cruel second husband is then, conveniently,
murdered, and the parental Hamiltons are reunited in
matrimony.
Although its acclaim was hardly unanimous, The Sport
of the Gods nonetheless 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
had suffered another lapse of poor health, and he
compounded his problems by resorting to alcohol. And
after The Sport of the Gods appeared in 1902,
Dunbar's marital situation—always
troublesome—degenerated further due to his continued
reliance on alcohol and to antagonism from his wife's
parents.
Dunbar and his wife separated in 1902, but that
separation only contributed to his continued physical and
psychological decline. The next year, following a nervous
breakdown and another bout of pneumonia, Dunbar managed
to assemble another verse collection, Lyrics of Love
and Laughter, and another short story collection, In
Old Plantation Days. With Lyrics of Love and
Laughter he confirmed his reputation as America's
premier black poet. The volume contains both sentimental
and somberly realistic expressions and depictions of
black life, and it features both dialect and standard
English verse. In Old Plantation Days is
comprised of twenty-five stories set on a southern
plantation during the days of slavery. Here Dunbar once
again resorted to caricaturing his own race, portraying
black slaves as faithful and obedient, slow-witted but
good-natured workers appreciative of their benevolent
white owners. Dunbar drew the ire of many critics for his
stereotyped characters, and some of his detractors even
alleged that he contributed to racist concepts while
simultaneously disdaining such thinking.
If In Old Plantation Days was hardly a
pioneering work, it was at least a lucrative publication
and one that confirmed the preferences of much of
Dunbar's public. With the short story collection The
Heart of Happy Hollow he presented a greater variety
of perspectives on aspects of black life in America, and
he even included a tale on the moral folly of lynching.
Dunbar followed The Heart of Happy Hollow with
two more poetry collections, Lyrics of Sunshine and
Shadow and Howdy, Honey, Howdy, both of
which featured works from previous volumes.
Dunbar's health continued to decline even as he persisted
in producing poems. But his reliance on alcohol to temper
his chronic coughing only exacerbated his illness, and by
the winter of 1905 he was fatally ill. He died on
February 9, 1906, at age thirty-three.
In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar's
standing as America's foremost black poet seemed assured,
and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements
in black American literature. In the ensuing decades,
however, his reputation was damaged by scholars
questioning the validity of his often stereotypic
characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to
sustain an anti-racist stance. Among his most vehement
detractors from this period was Victor Lawson, whose Dunbar
Critically Examined remains a provocative, if overly
aggressive, study.
More recently Dunbar's stature has increased markedly. He
is once again regarded as America's first great black
poet, and his standard English poems are now, perhaps
surprisingly, prized as his greatest achievements in
verse. Contemporary champions include Addison Gayle, Jr.,
whose Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence
Dunbar, is considered a key contribution to Dunbar
studies, and black poet Nikki Giovanni, whose prose
contribution to A Singer in the Dawn:
Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by
Jay Martin, hails Dunbar as "a natural resource of
our people." For Giovanni, as for other Dunbar
scholars, his work constitutes both a history and a
celebration of black life. "There is no poet, black
or nonblack, who measures his achievement," she
declared. "Even today. He wanted to be a writer and
he wrote."
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