Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio, to Matilda and Joshua Dunbar, both of whom were formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. His father escaped slavery and served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War, an experience that shaped the environment in which Dunbar grew up — one where history was very much a lived reality.
Dunbar exhibited a talent for language at an early age. As the only Black student at Dayton's Central High School, he edited the school newspaper, led the literary society, and was elected class poet. Among his classmates were Orville and Wilbur Wright, who would later help him print his first collection of poems on their printing press.
“He published that initial collection, *Oak and Ivy*, in 1893, selling copies to elevator passengers while working as an elevator operator, as he struggled to find employment that matched his education.”
His determination paid off. *Majors and Minors* followed in 1895, and when the influential critic William Dean Howells reviewed it in *Harper's Weekly*, Dunbar's national reputation skyrocketed almost overnight.
However, this acclaim came with a caveat. Howells highlighted Dunbar's dialect poems, written in the vernacular of Black Southern speech, as his most genuine work, and the public agreed. Publishers began to seek more dialect pieces. Dunbar, however, regarded his poems in standard English as equally serious and finely crafted, leading to his growing frustration as that work was overlooked. He expressed this conflict directly in "The Poet," a poem that serves as a subtle critique of being celebrated for the wrong reasons.
