Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was an African American poet, novelist and short-story writer born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved. He published his first poems while still in school and issued ‘Oak and Ivy’ (1893) at his own expense; ‘Majors and Minors’ (1895) and ‘Lyrics of Lowly Life’ (1896), the latter introduced by William Dean Howells, brought him national fame.

He wrote both in standard English and in the plantation dialect that audiences of his day expected, and was long best known for the latter, though he regretted that it overshadowed his other work. Poems such as ‘We Wear the Mask’, ‘Sympathy’ and ‘Ode to Ethiopia’ speak directly of race and hidden suffering. He died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three.