Dunbar, Paul Laurence

June 27, 1872
February 9, 1906

Paul Laurence Dunbar, the child of ex-slaves, was the first African-American writer to attain widespread fame for his literary activities. Known chiefly for his dialect poetry, Dunbar also broke new ground in several ways for the further development of an African-American literary tradition.

Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Dunbar showed early signs of literary ambition. He served as editor of his high school newspaper and at the same time began a short-lived newspaper of his own, the Dayton Tattler, focusing on matters of interest to the black community. Like most young black men, and despite a good school record, he confronted upon graduation a world with few opportunities and had to take work as an elevator operator; but he also became increasingly dedicated to his literary activity, especially to poetry. Encouraged by several white friends in Dayton as well as by the noted popular poet James Whitcomb Riley, Dunbar published locally his first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, in 1892. However, he achieved real fame in 1896, when an expanded and revised collection, Majors and Minors —also published mainly for a local audience—came to the attention of the prominent American writer William Dean Howells. Howells admired it and saw to the publication that year of a larger volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life, by the established American firm Dodd, Mead. It was the first of five major collections to be published by the company during Dunbar's lifetime.

Singled out for praise by Howells, and serving as the basis for Dunbar's fame, was his dialect verse. Fitting broadly into the popular, mainly white-authored, plantation-tradition literature of the time, Dunbar's dialect poetry created a sentimental portrait of African-American folklife in the antebellum South, treating a variety of themes, from love and courtship to social life and folk ideas. Although the dialect Dunbar used owed more to its literary antecedents than to actual folk speech, he also drew heavily on folk traditions for his own subjects and themes and thus often succeeded in giving real life to the form, freeing it from the stereotypes that dominated the works of white practitioners. The publication of this work, together with successful public readings of it throughout the United States and abroad, made Dunbar among the most popular poets, regardless of race, in America at the turn of the twentieth century.

Dunbar's success with dialect poetry had a powerful impact on black American literature during its time. He had few black predecessors in the form—although such early black dialect writers as James Edwin Campbell and Daniel Webster Davis were his exact contemporaries—but as his fame grew, so did the volume of dialect poetry in African-American literature. It began to appear frequently in black newspapers and magazines, and few collections of African-American poetry over the next two decades lacked at least some examples of dialect verse. Many were dominated by it.

Dunbar himself was ambivalent about his success with the dialect form. He wrote a great deal of poetry in standard English and felt that this was his most important work. Much of this verse is significant, especially for its time, as Dunbar not only addressed such contemporary issues as southern racial injustice and violence but broke notably from conventions of piety and gentility that had earlier dominated poetry by black Americans. Still, it was the dialect poetry that critics, black and white, praised during Dunbar's lifetime, a fact that the poet found greatly frustrating. His frustration spilled over into a personal life marked by real difficulties, including problems in his marriage to the talented writer Alice Moore Dunbar and the alcoholism and chronic ill health, culminating in tuberculosis, that led to his early death.

Although Dunbar made his reputation as a poet, his literary production during his brief life showed real diversity. It included a large number of short stories that appeared in popular magazines and in four major collections published by Dodd, Mead. Much of this short fiction complemented the popular dialect poetry, some of it written entirely in dialect and most of it featuring dialect-speaking folk characters. A few stories, however, moved in directions of protest, or of exploring issues of urbanization and cultural conflict. Dunbar also did some writing for the theater, including the highly popular musical comedy Clorindy, on which he collaborated with the composer William Marion Cook.

But some of his most important work, outside his poetry, lay in his novels. Dunbar published four novels; one, The Love of Landry (1900), was a sentimental work set in the American West, but the other three focused on questions of culture and identity in ways that allowed him to explore the issues affecting him as an individual and as an artist. These included The Uncalled (1899), tracing a young man's efforts to deal with pressures exerted on him to enter the ministry; The Fanatics (1901), a tale of Civil War–era Ohio; and The Sport of the Gods (1902), describing the travails of a black family forced to flee the South and to make its way in the more complex setting of urban New York. Only the last novel featured black protagonists, and it has often been considered the pioneering work in literary realism by a black writer. But all, excepting The Love of Landry, looked significantly and innovatively at the kinds of forces, cultural and psychological, that confront and constrain the individual in an effort to create a satisfying personal identity, and looked, at least implicitly at the meaning of race in American life.

Dunbar's work did not always fare well in the hands of critics in the years after his death. Not without justification, many found too much of the dialect work, despite the writer's efforts to the contrary, to be uncomfortably close to that of white plantation-tradition writers, contributing to the same stereotypes the plantation tradition helped to spread. But Dunbar's influence and originality remain important milestones in the subsequent evolution of an African-American literary tradition.

See also Dunbar-Nelson, Alice; Literature of the United States

Bibliography

Baker, Houston A., Jr. "The 'Limitless' Freedom of Myth: Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods and the Criticism of Afro-American Literature." In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, pp. 114–138. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Martin, Herbert Woodward, and Ronald Primeau, eds. In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.

Martin, Jay, ed. A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.

Revell, Peter. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973, pp. 73–125.

dickson d. bruce jr. (1996)
Updated bibliography