Biographical and Critical Essay
Oak and Ivy
Majors and Minors
Lyrics of Lowly Life
Lyrics of the Hearthside
"On Emancipation Day"
Lyrics of Love and Laughter
Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay

Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance
American Short-Story Writers, 1880-1910

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Selected Books

• Oak and Ivy (Dayton, Ohio: Press of United Brethren Publishing House, 1892).

• Majors and Minors: Poems (Toledo, Ohio: Hadley & Hadley, 1896).

• Lyrics of Lowly Life (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896; London: Chapman & Hall, 1897).

• Folks from Dixie (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898; London: Bowden, 1898).

• The Uncalled: A Novel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898; London: Service & Paton, 1899).

• Lyrics of the Hearthside (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899).

• The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900).

• The Love of Landry (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900).

• The Fanatics (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901).

• The Sport of the Gods (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902); republished as The Jest of Fate: A Story of Negro Life (London: Jarrold, 1902).

• Lyrics of Love and Laughter (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903).

• In Old Plantation Days (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903).

• The Heart of Happy Hollow (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904).

• Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905).

• The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Lida Keck Wiggins (Naperville, Ill. & Memphis, Tenn.: J.L. Nichols, 1907).

• The Complete Poems (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913).

• The Best Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Benjamin Brawley (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938).

• The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader, edited by Jay Martin and Gossie H. Hudson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975).

Other

• "Representative American Negroes," in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes (New York: James Pott, 1903), pp. 189-209.

• "The Tuskegee Song," in Selected Songs Sung by Students of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (Tuskegee, Ala.: Tuskegee Institute, 1904), p. 3.

Periodical Publications

• "England As Seen by a Black Man," Independent, 48 (16 September 1897): 4.

• "Our New Madness," Independent, 50 (15 September 1898): 469-471.

• "Negro Life in Washington," Harper's Weekly, 44 (13 January 1900): 32.

• "Negro Society in Washington," Saturday Evening Post, 174 (14 December 1901): 9.

Dunbar was born on 27 June 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, the child of Joshua and Matilda Murphy Dunbar, freed slaves who had made their way north from Kentucky. His grandparents had probably been slaves in Maryland. His father had escaped via the underground railroad to Canada before the Civil War but returned at the start of the war and enlisted in the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts, the second all-black regiment of the Union Army, in 1863. Dunbar's short story "The Ingrate" is based upon the details of his father's escape to Canada. Settling in Dayton after the war, Joshua Dunbar married, in 1871, Matilda Murphy, a young widow with two sons, and they subsequently had two children, Paul and Elizabeth, who died when she was two. Although his parents separated when Dunbar was one and a half years old, divorcing in 1876, he learned much from them. His mother taught him to read and shared his love of literature, and both she and his father (who died when Paul was twelve) told him stories of their experience as slaves, as did many family friends who had moved from the South following emancipation. He would later draw on these tales in writing many of his dialect poems and plantation stories. His childhood and schooling in Dayton were happy, fulfilling, and almost untouched by racial prejudice. He attended a black district grade school for a brief period but was generally, in grade schools and at Central High School in Dayton, from which he graduated in 1891, one of a small group of black pupils in a predominantly white school. According to his own statement in an interview, he wrote his first poem at the age of six, although elsewhere he said he began writing poetry at twelve. His first published work was a group of three poems, "Our Martyred Soldiers,""On the River," and "Emancipation," which appeared in the Dayton Herald in June 1888 when he was fourteen. The memorial ode and the pastoral idyll remained always among his preferred forms of expression in poetry.

At Central High he was elected president of the Philomathean Literary Society and editor of the High School Times, but his most significant endeavor was the attempt to establish the Dayton Tattler, a paper "for the colored people of Ohio," in which he was assisted by Orville and Wilbur Wright (later to achieve fame for their pioneering exploits in aviation), classmates who had set up a printing shop, among their other youthful enterprises. Appearing spasmodically, the Tattler failed after very few issues because its income from advertising was too little, providing perhaps a first lesson in the difficulties of writing primarily for a black readership, though Dunbar retained the friendship of the Wright brothers and of other white and black friends from high-school days.

Graduation brought a bitter lesson in the difficulties of merely making a living for a young black, even in the relatively tolerant white community of Dayton. In spite of his high-school successes, and thinking of entering Harvard to study law, Dunbar could find no place in the business or professional life of the town and took a job at four dollars a week as an elevator boy in an office building. But he kept writing, both poems and articles that appeared (often for no pay) in several mid-western papers; for six dollars he sold his first story, "The Tenderfoot," to a newspaper syndicate and passed time in the elevator reading and rereading his favorite poets: William Shakespeare; John Keats; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Edgar Allan Poe; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; James Russell Lowell; and--perhaps most important of all--James Whitcomb Riley, whose dialect and humor were to be especially influential on Dunbar's later work. His much later short story "One Man's Fortunes" reflects this period of his life.

His ambitions to become a writer might have ended there but for the chance that the Western Association of Writers chose in the summer of 1892 to meet in Dayton. One of Dunbar's former high-school teachers arranged for him to write a "Welcome Address" in verse and to recite the poem at one of the association's meetings. The poem impressed his listeners more by the youth and the race of its author than by its merits, but some among his audience sought him out the next day in his elevator and one of them, James Newton Matthews, invited him to join the association and wrote a letter on Dunbar for the newspaper in his hometown of Mason, Illinois. This letter was reprinted in newspapers throughout the Middle West: one reader of it was James Whitcomb Riley, at that time probably the most popular and widely read poet in America. On 27 November 1892 Riley sent Dunbar a kindly letter of encouragement: "See how your name is traveling, my chirping friend. And it's a good, sound name, too, that seems to imply the brave, fine spirit of a singer who should command wide and serious attention."

Riley's influence (especially in Dunbar's "A Summer Pastoral" and "The Ol' Tunes") is evident, along with that of John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in the poems which Dunbar continued to contribute to Midwestern newspapers and to recite at church and YMCA meetings in nearby towns. After his success with local audience, he decided to publish a collection of poems at his own expense, paying the printer by installments from the proceeds of sales of the book to subscribers and audiences at his readings. Published in an edition of 1,000 copies, Oak and Ivy, which was dated 1893 but appeared in December 1892, contains a few poems which continue to hold a significant place in Dunbar's oeuvre. Most notable is the volume's first poem, "Ode to Ethiopia," an eloquent and optimistic tribute that employs the formalized language of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English poetry to celebrate black America's past of labor and suffering and its hopeful future:

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;

Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll

In characters of fire.

High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky

Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,

And truth shall lift them higher.

Despite his erstwhile hope to study law, Dunbar had by the beginning of 1893 progressed no further in Dayton than a temporary job as a page in the courthouse. His mother now managed a living by taking in the neighbors' washing. Early that year Dunbar met and became lifelong friends with Charles A. Thatcher, a Toledo lawyer who began his long encouragement and patronage of Dunbar by offering to pay part of his college expenses and soliciting help from others. But Dunbar reluctantly had to refuse, since his mother could not support herself entirely alone, and Thatcher helped the young poet instead by sponsoring readings at which he might sell copies of Oak and Ivy in the Toledo area. In June 1893 Dunbar determined to try his luck in the big city and made his way to Chicago, where he hoped to find work in the World's Columbian Exposition, the first world's fair. This decision was one of the most significant of his life, for he made the acquaintance there of Frederick Douglass, the foremost black Abolitionist leader in nineteenth-century America and the commissioner in charge of the Haitian exhibition, who engaged him as a clerk at the Haitian Building. Douglass, who was near the end of his career and whose impression on the young Dunbar is apparent from Dunbar's two later poetical tributes, arranged that Dunbar should read a selection of his poems at the Colored American Day celebrations at the Exposition. Through Douglass, Dunbar also met a number of young black writers and performers, including the poet James D. Corrothers. It was here that he met the composer Will Marion Cook, with whom he would later collaborate writing musicals for black theaters.

Dunbar's return to Dayton after this enkindling experience was anticlimactic, but at this time, suffering from critical money troubles, he met and gained the friendship of another lifelong supporter, Henry A. Tobey, a psychiatrist who, after offering Dunbar $500 to pay tuition fees at Harvard (and being refused, since the money would not cover both Dunbar's mother's mortgage and his fees), helped bring about the decisive event of his life. Dunbar's work had continued to be accepted in local newspapers and in 1895 it began to appear in major newspapers such as the New York Times and in popular and national magazines such as the Chicago magazine, the Independent, Blue and Gray, Munsey's, and, perhaps most important, the Century magazine. But it was only with the financial help of Tobey, Thatcher, and some of their friends that Dunbar's second collection, Majors and Minors, appeared. Dated 1895 but privately printed in January 1896 by Hadley and Hadley of Toledo, the book was a remarkable achievement in view of Dunbar's limited apprenticeship as a writer. Though it republished some of the poems from Oak and Ivy , it also contained much new material, both in standard English and in dialect, including many of his finest, and later most popular, poems. The technical level of accomplishment displayed is considerable, notably in "We Wear the Mask," a terse and impassioned statement of the agony of "double-consciousness" (to use the term later coined by W. E. B. Du Bois) which the black artist, and by inference all black men, must endure to achieve self-expression--or merely to survive--in a white-dominated society. This poem, though it attracted little attention at the time, remains one of the outstanding achievements of black American poetry. More popular were poems that were later favorites in recitations: "Ships That Pass in the Night," "When Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes" (demonstrating Dunbar's hypnotic use of modulated vowel sounds and liquid consonants to charm an audience), and also such Riley-derived pastoral poems (though sometimes black in context) as "The Cornstalk Fiddle," "The Spellin' Bee," "When de Co'n Pone's Hot," and especially "When Malindy Sings," an engaging tribute to his mother and to humble black domesticity.

Poems of this quality would be sure to find their way to a wide audience eventually, but, through the action of his white friends, they brought Dunbar national fame almost overnight. H.A. Tobey, who lost no opportunity to recommend Dunbar's work, gave a copy of Majors and Minors to James A. Herne, a well-known actor and playwright, who was playing at a Toledo theater. Herne read the book, wrote enthusiastically to Dunbar, and passed the book on to his friend William Dean Howells, who was by this time the most influential, and in many respects the most generous, literary critic in America. Howells, a fellow Ohioan, had in the past introduced many other young writers to a wider public and was also interested in "the Negro question." His lengthy and reflective review of the book in Harper's Weekly for 27 June 1896 brought the young poet's name to the attention of readers throughout America, but it set a direction of criticism of Dunbar's work which persisted throughout his career and, as Dunbar himself came to feel, limited the development of his talent. Howells rightly assumed that the "Majors" were poems in standard English and the "Minors" (about a quarter of the total and at the end of the book) were poems in dialect, but he declared that there was nothing in the standard-English poems which "except for the Negro face of the author" one could find especially notable and "It is when we come to Mr. Dunbar's Minors that we feel ourselves in the presence of a man with a direct and a fresh authority to do the kind of thing he is doing." "One can see how the poet exults in his material, as the artist always does; it is not for him to blink its commonness, or to be ashamed of its rudeness; and in his treatment of it he has been able to bring us nearer to the heart of primitive human nature in his race than any else has yet done. The range between appetite and emotion is not great, but it is here that his race has hitherto had its being, with a life now and then far above and beyond it. A rich, humorous sense pervades his recognition of this fact, without excluding a fond sympathy, and it is the blending of these which delights me in all his dialect verse." Even to contemporary ears this statement could not have sounded particularly flattering, but Howells had decided that the white reader would be likely to respond to these qualities. His criticism of the poems themselves shows his usual discernment. He found some poems that "recall the too easy pathos of the pseudo-negro poetry of the minstrel show" but singled out "When Malindy Sings" for special praise as "purely and intensely black" and responded to "the strong full pulse of the music in all these things." His summary was only slightly wide of the truth when he remarked that Dunbar was "the first man of his color to study his race objectively, to analyze it to himself, and then to represent it in art as he felt it and found it to be; to represent it humorously, yet tenderly, and above all so faithfully that we know the portrait to be undeniably like."

In reality, Dunbar's endeavors to express the life and soul of his race in poetry had not been as simple and uncomplicated for him as Howells's well-meant words of praise might suggest. There was immense difficulty in finding appropriate language and style, since there was no real precedent for Dunbar apart from the minstrel shows and the humor and bathos of a few dialect poets. He had first tried the form and language of traditional heroic poetry in poems such as "Ode to Ethiopia." His dialect poems, initially "Negro" variation on Riley's popular Hoosier dialect pieces, were more recent and fully represented for the first time in Majors and Minors . Dunbar also aspired to be more than a poet of racial themes. The larger proportion of his work in verse was, and continued to be, without any racial connotation in both style and subject. Yet his simple love poems, pastorals, meditative reflections, and poems of homespun philosophy are competent but usually unremarkable expressions in the mainstream verse tradition established principally by Longfellow, with an admixture of influence from Alfred Tennyson, John Keats, and such Americans as Bayard Taylor and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The love poems are the strongest of these nonracial poems.

It was unfortunate that Howells missed the value and importance of Dunbar's heroic poems on black themes (which Dunbar nevertheless continued to include in later collections), but his assessments were otherwise reasonably sound. His review was in any case as spectacular a launch as any aspiring writer from the Middle West could hope to receive. In 1896 Dunbar was invited to New York, where he met Howells and Major James B. Pond, a well-known entrepreneur of the literary-lecture circuit, who had earlier arranged reading tours by Mark Twain and James Whitcomb Riley, among others. Dunbar, who was already an accomplished reader of his own work from his years of experience in the Middle West, gave a number of readings in the New York area and became a new kind of celebrity, not least--significantly--among visitors from the South. After one reading he was introduced, at her request, to the widow of Jefferson Davis. Pond's publicity machine, which could provide newspaper coverage as required, proved especially beneficial, and Dunbar received a number of offers from publishers, the best, from Dodd, Mead, including an advance payment of $400. Near the end of his annus mirabilis of 1896, this New York firm brought out Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life, with an introduction by Howells. Only eleven of the 105 poems in this volume were new, and none of this new material was particularly significant, but the volume was the most important Dunbar ever produced because it introduced his work to a nationwide audience. It contained, moreover, a substantial part of his best work in verse, which had in large part already been written.

Dunbar's later work does not represent a falling off in achievement, for he continued to refine and polish his technical abilities. Yet, although he was still to write many fine poems, there was a certain leveling-off in achievement and no further significant new departures. The chief gain in Dunbar's later poetry is his increasing skill in handling dramatic situations and direct speech in the dialect poems. As Dunbar became a full-time writer, he devoted an increasingly greater proportion of his time to fiction, and it was in this genre that he showed himself most willing, and perhaps most able, to try new creative paths, though he always regarded this prose work as of secondary importance, and much of it is indeed minor.

In 1896 and 1897 Dunbar also met for the first time many important people, notably two of the major black leaders of the time, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom he often appeared on public platforms, reciting his own work in support of various black causes. Dunbar's poetry, in its ambivalence on racial matters, expresses the opposing viewpoints of both these leaders. His dialect poetry recalls Washington's belief in conciliation with white economic power by improving the image of the black as a humble worker, while the forceful statements of his poems in literary English on black themes suggest Du Bois's attempts to inculcate black pride in the achievements of its "talented tenth." Dunbar's deepest feelings on racial matters were expressed in a number of newspaper articles, published between 1898 and 1903, which reflect his hatred of the means of oppression--lynching, peonage, and disfranchisement--practiced in the South and often condoned in the North.

In February 1897 Dunbar at last met the beautiful and talented Alice Ruth Moore, a white-skinned New Orleans writer and teacher of Creole background. In the spring of 1895 Dunbar had seen her picture in the Boston Monthly Review and started a correspondence with her; for two years they had written each other regularly, sharing each other's works and Dunbar, when for a short time in 1895 he was temporarily editing a small, black newspaper in Indianapolis, actually publishing one of her short stories of old New Orleans. Their epistolary relationship quickly developed into a passionate romance, and they became engaged on their first meeting, at a reception given for Dunbar the evening before he departed for England to undertake a reading tour under the management of Major Pond's daughter. The tour was a financial disaster, though he arranged for an English edition of Lyrics of Lowly Life with the London house of Chapman and Hall (it appeared in 1897) and gave some successful readings--including one arranged by Ambassador John Hay at the U.S. Embassy (it was the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee)--and Dunbar had to write to H.A. Tobey, who continued to aid his career, for his return fare. The most fruitful part of his visit was his collaboration with the black English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on an operetta, Dream Lovers , for which Dunbar wrote the libretto. On his return in August 1897, another white friend, Robert G. Ingersoll, secured for him a position as reading-room assistant at the Library of Congress which he took up in the fall and held until the end of 1898. On the strength of this job, the only salaried employment of his life apart from earlier temporary periods of menial and newspaper work, he was able to marry Alice Moore on 6 March 1898. At her urging and after only fifteen months of this work, he felt sufficiently secure of the income from his writing to resign the post, which was taxing his already delicate health.

In Washington Dunbar's career entered its most buoyant and productive phase. The connection with Dodd, Mead became a permanent one, the firm paying him a regular salary, in addition to royalties. He was given an honorary M.A. degree by Atlanta University in 1899. He continued to give highly successful and profitable readings and to produce an astonishing amount of work, including essays, stories, articles, and novels in addition to two volumes of poems. His work was sought eagerly and accepted readily, rarely with any call for revision, by quality magazines, notably the Century,Lippincott's Monthly magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post, and some of the leading newspapers of New York, Boston, and Washington. In 1899, Dodd, Mead published Lyrics of the Hearthside, containing some 110 poems, none of which had appeared in a previous volume. In spite of Howells's advocacy of his dialect poetry and its subsequent popularity, Dunbar appears to have retained editorial control of the new collection, in which poems of humor and dialect are again, as in Majors and Minors, at the back of the volume. The book is dedicated "To Alice," and the first section is largely devoted to poems of lofty romanticism and philosophical seriousness ("Love's Apotheosis" and "The Right to Die," for example) which probably represent the kind of work Dunbar most wanted to write and for which he desired recognition. Though some of these, such as "Sympathy," reflecting the heartaches the poet must endure in the service of his art ("I know what the caged bird feels, alas!"), are touching and even memorable, as a whole they lack the "strong full pulse" Howells found in the earlier dialect poems. The reader must work his way seventy-five pages into the volume before he comes upon any mention of the black race, yet some of the best poems in the book are the three poems in literary English on black themes--"The Conquerers (The Black Troops in Cuba)," "Alexander Crummell--Dead," and the sonnet to Harriet Beecher Stowe Among the fairly numerous dialect pieces are three--"Jilted," "Temptation," and "How Lucy Backslid"--which have considerable verbal power and exemplify Dunbar's developing gift for lively dialogue, drily understated humor, and the dramatic development of character in verse, as in these lines from "How Lucy Backslid": "Fu' a gal won't let 'uligion er no othah so't o' t'ing/Stop huh w'en she teks a notion dat she wants a weddin' ring."

It is possible that some of his Lucy poems took their impulse from his increasingly troubled relations with Alice Dunbar. There was a brief separation in 1900 and a permanent one in 1902. The couple had been increasingly quarrelsome over the last three or more years, perhaps over Dunbar's increasing moodiness, perhaps over his persistent drinking. The reasons for their estrangement are not clear, but Alice's family seems to have objected to Dunbar's lack of a college education, his blacker complexion, and his mother's menial work. Alice herself, though she may have resented Dunbar's success, certainly objected strongly to his willingness to sacrifice his artistic integrity to commercial success. Such artistic compromise was particularly evident in his collaborations on various theatrical ventures, from 1898 onward, with Will Marion Cook, a black composer who was classically trained but more commercially successful in producing musical revues; in these the old vogue of minstrelsy and the new vogue of ragtime were blended to produce results which, while occasionally racially degrading, were also usually fresh, vigorous, and not without comic charm. Dunbar contributed the lyrics to some of these shows, which included Clorindy (1898), Uncle Eph's Christmas (1899), Jes Lak White Fo'ks (1900), and In Dahomey (1902). The shows, and Dunbar's contributions to them, were highly successful, yet the price of his success became apparent when one of the reviews of Uncle Eph's Christmas referred to him as the "prince of the coon song writers." Dunbar made frequent visits in these years to New York, where he was a familiar of many of the well-known black theater people of the day, including Ernest Hogan, Bert Williams, Rosamond Johnson, and Jim Europe. His response to the brash and earthy appeal of the Negro club life of New York is reflected in some of his short stories. The tone of the lyrics he wrote for these shows is not so far removed from that of some of the dialect poems. One of these poems, included in Majors and Minors, provided the words of the song "Jump Back Honey" in Clorindy . Working without Dunbar's collaboration, other composers set a number of the dialect poems to music, during and after Dunbar's lifetime, with generally admirable results, since their tone of impassioned or wistful longing is well suited to vocal performance, as is clear in Paul Robeson's recording of Dunbar's "Li'l Gal." Dunbar's reluctant faith in the theater was vindicated by In Dahomey, which became the first all-Negro show to run in the heart of New York's theaterland when it opened at the New York Theater on Times Square on 18 February 1903. After a successful run there it was taken to London and achieved even greater success, including a command performance at Buckingham Palace. Dunbar's lyrics, particularly "On Emancipation Day," were some of the highlights of this successful and innovative theatrical venture.

A commercial venture of a different kind was the republication of selections of Dunbar's poetry in illustrated volumes, probably at the suggestion of his publishers, though Dunbar enthusiastically approved the volumes and their illustrations. There were six of these published, beginning in 1899: Poems of Cabin and Field (1899), Candle-Lightin' Time (1901), When Malindy Sings (1903), Li'l Gal (1904), Howdy, Honey, Howdy (1905), and Joggin Erlong (1906). Designed to charm white purchasers with an idyll of rural simplicity, these books illustrated the poems with photographs which emphasized the life of poor blacks in the South as ragged but picturesque. They sold well, in the United States and in England.

Beginning in 1899 the decisive fact of Dunbar's life was his steadily deteriorating health, yet it brought no abatement in his remarkable productivity. In that year he came near to death from an attack of pneumonia. He survived, but the illness brought on latent tuberculosis, from which he sought relief in the healthier climate of the Catskills and later Colorado. Yet he continued to undertake an extensive program of readings, though these gravely taxed his strength, and the four years following his breakdown were astonishingly prolific. Following the permanent separation from his wife, he left their fashionable home at 321 Spruce Street in Washington and lived in Chicago for a period. He undertook an extensive reading tour and in autumn 1903 settled permanently with his mother in the house he had bought for her at 219 North Summit Street in Dayton. (He may have lived with her briefly in late 1902 as well.)

Dunbar's last years were troubled and unhappy, not only with the certainty of an early death and the failure of his marriage (he sought to the end to achieve a reconciliation) but mostly because he felt that his talent had been misused. A brief visit during a 1901 reading tour to the home of his friend and fellow poet James Weldon Johnson in Jacksonville, Florida, is revealingly recorded in Johnson's autobiography, Along This Way (1933). Johnson noted the success of Dunbar's reading in Jacksonville, attended by a large number of local white people, and his skill as a reader: "His voice was a perfect musical instrument, and he knew how to use it with extreme effect." Johnson further recorded that "During his visit he wrote a half dozen or so poems. As quickly as he finished them he sent these off; two of them, I remember, to the Saturday Evening Post; and I was amazed at seeing how promptly he received checks in return. Whatever he wrote was in demand." Yet Johnson's comments also reveal that this success brought no consolation: "We talked again and again about poetry. I told him my doubts regarding the further possibilities of stereotyped dialect. He was hardly less dubious than I. He said, 'You know, of course, that I didn't start as a dialect poet. I simply came to the conclusion that I could write it as well, if not better, than anybody else I know of, and that by doing so I should gain a hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect.' There was a tone of self-reproach in what he said; and five years later, in his fatal illness, he sounded that same tone more deeply when he said to me, `I've kept on doing the same things, and doing them no better. I have never gotten to the things I really wanted to do.'"

Dunbar never made clear what these things were, but Johnson surmised "that it was not that he desired merely to write more poems in literary English, such as he had already done, but that it was his ambition to write one or two long, perhaps epical, poems in straight English that would relate to the Negro."

Dunbar's misgivings about his work in dialect are expressed in a short poem entitled "The Poet," an autobiographical lament for lost promise:

He sang of love when earth was young,

And Love, itself, was in his lays.

But ah, the world, it turned to praise

A jingle in a broken tongue.

These poems, together with the best that were collected in Lyrics of Lowly Life, were the summit of Dunbar's achievement in verse, for the work of his last years in Dayton, collected in Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905), was inevitably, as his strength failed and his drinking (to ease his cough and ease his pain) increased, much weaker. Considerably less than half are in dialect, and the overall mood is one of escape to some imagined pastoral, childhood paradise, implied in such Rileyesque titles as "Wadin' in de Crick" and "The Plantation Child's Lullaby."

Dunbar died in Dayton on 9 February 1906, aged thirty-three, reconciled to death and sure that his life had not been entirely wasted. At the last he was glad to have "left the city's heat / For this sylvan, cool retreat," but the mood of these late poems and of some of the plantation tales, which he had earlier written in response to commercial pressures, should not be allowed to establish him as an anti-urban apologist for white southern agrarianism. All his life he had struggled in the cities of the North and on the hazardous terrain of the white-dominated publishing establishment. His achievement, against the massive odds to which such contemporary black writers as Charles W. Chesnutt eventually succumbed, was unique. He well merited the accolade, first bestowed by Booker T. Washington and later repeated by critics and admirers of both races, of "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race." At his death and long afterward his position as the first black writer in America to achieve national acclaim by his expression of the thoughts and feelings of his race was accepted without demur, but in the 1940s and 1950s a sharp reaction, typified by Victor Lawson's markedly hostile critical study, sought to emphasize Dunbar's concessions to the detrimental stereotyping of black life imposed by the demands of white publishers and editors. In recent years a critical reappraisal has begun, assisted by the publication of much previously uncollected work in The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader (1975) and by the new historical awareness engendered by the development of black studies, which has made it possible to see Dunbar in the context of his own times. This reappraisal has so far gained most strength from study of the novels and stories, but there is a growing understanding of the particular merits of the poetry and an increased realization that the dialect poems are, in Nikki Giovanni's words, "the best examples of our plantation speech," that at their best they transcend the degrading tradition from which they appear to spring.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR