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Paul Laurence Dunbar |
Paul Laurence Dunbar grew up in Dayton, Ohio, son of an escaped slave and a civil war hero who died young. He was the only African American in his high school. With the support of his washerwoman mother, as well as his friends Wilbur and Orville Wright, Dunbar excelled in school and published his first poetry book at twenty-one, working as an elevator operator to pay the printer. His classical poems were his favorites, but his dialect poems offering a sentimental portrait of slavery were what the market wanted, and they made him famous on the recital circuit in the United States and England.
He married a well-educated bi-racial woman light enough to pass as white, but began to drink heavily and beat her until she left him. In 1898 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and over the next five years he wrote novels, short stories, and poetry, traveling the circuit, performing his dialect poems, and drinking alone. He died at his mother’s home in Dayton at thirty-three.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |