Brief Biography:

On June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio, poet and novelist, Paul Laurence Dunbar was born. Dunbar, the son of former slaves from Kentucky, was the last of a generation whose parents had been born slaves. His mother Matilda Murphy found her freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and his father Joshua escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. He return to the United States to enlist in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War. Dunbar had one sibling from that marriage as well as two others from his mother's previous marriage. From each of his parents, Dunbar gained first-hand accounts of the lives of slaves and their oral traditions. 

In 1874, when he was only two years old, his parents separated. To provide for her four children (two conceived in a previous marriage to her late husband Mr. Murphy), Matilda became a washerwoman for various families in the Dayton area, including the Wright family whose famous sons, Wilbur and Orville, would become her own son Paul's high school buddies. 

When growing up as a slave in Lexington, Kentucky, Matilda loved listening to her master read great works of literature to his wife. This love for literary works, especially poetry, continued throughout her life, and she made a point of encouraging her children to read. His mother's inspiration and love for reading had a profound effect on young Paul who wrote his first poem at six and gave his first poetry reading-recitation at the age of nine. 

After grade school, he attended Dayton Central High School. Despite his status as the only black American in his class, he served as the class president and class poet. In addition to these positions, Dunbar served as editor of the school paper, president of the school's literary society, and was a member of the debate team. 

During the Fall semester of his senior year in high school, Dunbar briefly wrote and edited the Daily Tattler, an African-American newspaper, financed by Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Wrights in conjunction with Dunbar hoped that the Daily Tattler would aid the cause of republicanism and end the Democratic Party's tactic of buying black votes. As Dunbar wrote in his first editorial, dated the thirteenth of December, 1890: "Her mission shall be to encourage and assist the enterprises of the city, to give our young people a field in which to exercise their literary talents, to champion the cause of right, and to espouse the principles of honest republicanism. The desire which is the guiding star of our existence is that some word may be dropped in our columns, which shall reach the hearts of our colored voters and snatch them from the brink of the yawning chasm of paid democracy." Despite their high hopes, the Daily Tattler shut down after six issues because it wasn't profitable. Dunbar learned from this loss the need to target his writing to an audience of both blacks and whites who would support his efforts. 

Although he desired to attend law school after he graduated with honors from high school in 1891, financial considerations would not permit it. He made a living for himself as an elevator operator at the Callahan Building, a hotel in Dayton, for $4.00 per week. In his free time, he read other poets, including Shakespeare, Schiller, and Poe, in the hope of finding his own voice in the poetry that he wrote. In time, the stories of his parents found voice in his poetry. In 1892, roughly a year after his high school graduation,  a former high school teacher arranged for Dunbar to address the Western Association of Writers whose meeting was held in Dayton. His "Welcome Address" caught the attention of Dr. James Newton Matthews who wrote a favorable review of Dunbar's poetry that appeared in many newspapers in the U.S. and England. Matthews’ letter was reprinted in papers across the country, which gave Dunbar attention all over the region. Since he was becoming better known, he decided to publish a book of poems in 1892. Once again with the aid of Orville Wright, Dunbar found the sources to get his writings before the public. Although Orville's print shop lacked the capabilities for binding a book, he did assist Dunbar in getting his poems published at the United Brethren publishing house. With the assistance of the business manager who lent him $125, Dunbar published fifty-six of his poems in an edition, which he called  Oak and Ivy. He sold these volumes for one dollar to those with whom he came in contact. In short order, he not only repaid his debt to the business manager but also saw his popularity spread, as made evident by requests for poetry recitations and favorable newspaper reviews.  In 1893, he joined Frederick Douglass who called Dunbar "the most promising young colored man in America" in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition to fight against the resurgent Confederate power. 

In 1895, he moved to Toledo , Ohio with help from attorney Charles A. Thatcher and psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey, who were both fans of Dunbar ’s work. They helped get him spaces to read his poems at local libraries and other literal gatherings. They also paid for his second book, Majors and Minors, to be published. It was this book that really heightened his fame to a national level. A New York published firm later combined his first two books as Lyrics of a Lowly Life, which included an introduction by William Dean Howells, the editor of Harper’s Weekly. Then, in 1897 his fame grew out of the country and across the Atlantic Ocean to England . He traveled to London and recited his poems on the London literary circuit.

Once he returned to the states, Dunbar married Alice Ruth Moore, a young writer with a master’s degree from Cornell University . He also took a job in Washington , D.C. at the Library of Congress. He only worked there for a year because he thought the work was tiresome and it was later believed that all of the dust in the Library contributed to his case of tuberculosis. The main reason he quit, however, was because he decided to write and recite his poems and stories full time.

Dunbar and his wife separated in 1902. The break up left him in a state of depression, which, in addition to his declining health, lead him to a dependence on alcohol. He did continue to write and ended up producing 12 books of poetry, four books of short stories, a play and five novels. His work appeared in Harper’s Weekly, the Sunday Evening Post, the Denver Post, Current Literature, and a number of other magazine and journals. He spent some time traveling to visit his siblings before returning home to his mother in Dayton where he died on February 9, 1906 at the age of 33.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American poet to gain national popularity. His work was loved by both black and white readers, and is still appreciated today by scholars as well as taught in schools. He had a very unique style because he used the standard English of a classical poet as well as the dialect of the “turn-of-the-century black community in America ” ( Dayton ). He was compared to Mark Twain, because he used the dialect in his poems like Twain did in his prose to convey character.

Works Cited

Jones, Trevelyn E. School Library Journal; Sep2000, Vol. 46 Issue 9, p 254. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3560534&site=ehost-live&scope=site> Academic Search Premier

Paul Laurence Dunbar Web Site. University of Dayton . February 3, 2003 . <http://www.plethoreum.org/dunbar/>

Simon, Denise. Black Issues Book Review: Sep/Oct2005, Vol. 7 Issue 5, p60-61. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=18066776&site=ehost-live&scope=site> Academic Search Premier