Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872 to Joshua and Matilda Dunbar, who were both enslaved in Kentucky before the Civil War. The legacy of their struggles—bondage, survival, and the hard-fought journey to freedom—shapes much of his writing.
Dunbar showed his talent for writing early on. By the age of sixteen, he was publishing poems in a local newspaper, and despite being the only Black student in his high school class, his peers elected him president of the literary society. One of those peers was Orville Wright, who later helped Dunbar self-publish his first collection using the Wright brothers' printing press.
“After graduating, Dunbar struggled to find suitable work, settling for a job operating an elevator in a Dayton office building.”
Nevertheless, he continued to write. In 1893, he showcased his work at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he caught the attention of Frederick Douglass. This connection helped him gain recognition. His 1896 collection, *Lyrics of Lowly Life*, which included a preface by noted critic William Dean Howells, catapulted him to national fame almost overnight.
However, this fame came with challenges. Howells praised Dunbar's dialect poems—written in the vernacular of Black rural life in the South—and the white reading audience gravitated towards those works above all else. Dunbar felt constrained by this reception. He also wrote serious poetry in standard English, creating pieces filled with lyric beauty and deep emotion about race, identity, and the pressures of conforming to societal expectations. His poem "We Wear the Mask" captures this tension and has only become more relevant over the years.
