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Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was a prolific writer whose impressive body of novels, poems, and stories established his place among the first great Black American writers. The son of former enslaved people, Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, where he published his first poems while still in high school. His family’s financial situation put a university education out of reach, so Dunbar initially worked an elevator operator. Though unsuitable for his ambition, his job enabled him to write poems that he would publish in his first collection, Oak and Ivy (1893). This work won Dunbar influential supporters who published his second collection, Majors and Minors (1895), which featured poems written in standard English (the “majors”) as well as in dialect (the “minors”). Though in the decade before his premature death of tuberculosis at the age of 33 he would publish many other volumes of poetry, several novels and short story collections, as well as the lyrics for the first African-American musical produced on Broadway (In Dahomey), Dunbar’s early reputation rested on the poems written in “Negro dialect.” This reputation declined throughout the twentieth century, as critics increasingly felt that the dialectical verse tended too much toward harmful stereotype. More recently, however, Dunbar’s reputation has risen once more, this time with greater emphasis on the poems written in standard English, such as “We Wear the Mask.”

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