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Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dunbar circa 1890
Born(1872-06-27)June 27, 1872
Dayton, Ohio, United States
DiedFebruary 9, 1906(1906-02-09) (aged 33)
Dayton, Ohio
Cause of deathTuberculosis
Resting placeWoodland Cemetery
Dayton, Ohio
NationalityAmerican
OccupationPoet
SpouseAlice Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906, Dayton, Ohio) was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had been slaves in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar started to write as a child and was elected president of his class in high school. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper.

Much of his more popular work in his lifetime was written in the Negro dialect associated with the antebellum South. His work was praised by William Dean Howells, a leading critic associated with the Atlantic Monthly, and Dunbar was one of the first African American writers to establish a national reputation. He wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy, In Dahomey (1903), the first all African-American musical produced on Broadway; the musical also toured in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Dunbar also wrote in conventional English in other poetry and novels; since the late 20th century, scholars have become more interested in these other works. Suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar died at age 33.

Biography

Early life

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born at 311 Howard Street in Dayton, Ohio on June 27, 1872 to parents who had been slaves in Kentucky before the American Civil War.[1] After being emancipated, his mother Matilda had moved to Dayton with other family members, including her two sons Robert and William from her first marriage. Dunbar's father Joshua had escaped from slavery in Kentucky before the war ended. He traveled to Massachusetts and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of the first two black units to serve in the war. The senior Dunbar also served in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment. Paul Dunbar was born six months after Joshua and Matilda married on Christmas Eve, 1871.[1]

Dunbar's parents began having marital problems a few months after their son's birth. They also had a daughter together, whom Joshua ignored. Because of their problems, Matilda took all her children and left him.[2] Joshua Dunbar died on August 16, 1885, when his son Paul was 12 years old.[3]

Dunbar wrote his first poem at age 6 and gave his first public recital at age 9. His mother Matilda assisted him in his schooling, having learned to read expressly for that purpose. She often read the Bible with him, and thought he might become a minister for the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[4] It was the first independent black denomination, founded in Philadelphia in the early 19th century.

Dunbar was the only African-American student during his years at Central High School in Dayton. Well-accepted, he was elected as class president, and became the editor of the school newspaper, as well as president of the school literary society.[4][5]

Writing career

At the age of 16, Dunbar published "Our Martyred Soldiers" and "On The River" in 1888 in Dayton's The Herald newspaper.[3] In 1890 Dunbar wrote and edited The Tattler, Dayton's first weekly African-American newspaper. It was printed by the fledgling company of his high school acquaintances, Wilbur and Orville Wright. The paper lasted 6 weeks.[6]

After completing his formal schooling in 1891, Dunbar took a job as an elevator operator, earning a salary of four dollars a week.[3] He had hoped to go to study law, but was not able to because of his mother's limited finances, and he was restricted at work because of racial discrimination. The next year, Dunbar asked the Wrights to publish his dialect poems in book form, but the brothers did not have a facility that could print books. They suggested he go to the United Brethren Publishing House which, in 1893, printed Dunbar's first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy.[6] Dunbar subsidized the printing of the book, and quickly earned back his investment in two weeks by selling copies personally,[7] often to passengers on his elevator.[8]

The larger section of the book, the "Oak" section, consisted of traditional verse, whereas the smaller section, the "Ivy", featured light poems written in dialect.[8] The work attracted the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, the popular "Hoosier Poet". Both Riley and Dunbar wrote poems in both standard English and dialect.

His gifts were recognized and older men reached out to help him. Attorney Charles A. Thatcher offered to help him with college, but Dunbar wanted to persist with writing, as he was encouraged by his sales of poetry. Thatcher helped promote Dunbar, arranging work to read his poetry in the larger city of Toledo at "libraries and literary gatherings."[5] In addition, psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey took an interest and assisted Dunbar, helping distribute his first book in Toledo and sometimes offering him financial aid. Together, Thatcher and Tobey supported publishing Dunbar's second verse collection, Majors and Minorsstupid 


(1896)[5]

Despite frequently publishing poems and occasionally giving public readings, Dunbar had difficulty supporting himself and his mother. Many of his efforts were unpaid and he was a reckless spender, leaving him in debt by the mid-1890s.[9]

On June 27, 1896, the novelist, editor, and critic William Dean Howells, who was associated with the prominent Atlantic Monthly based in Boston, published a favorable review of Dunbar's second book, Majors and Minors. Howells' influence brought national attention to the poet's writing.[10] Though Howell praised the "honest thinking and true feeling" in Dunbar's traditional poems, he particularly praised the dialect poems.[11] The new literary fame enabled Dunbar to publish his first two books as the collected volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life, which included an introduction by Howells.

Dunbar maintained a lifelong friendship with the Wright brothers. Through his poetry, he met and became associated with black leaders Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. He also became a friend of Brand Whitlock, a journalist in Toledo who went on to work in Chicago, then became part of state government and had a political and diplomatic career.[12]

By the late 1890s, Dunbar started to explore the short story and novel forms; in the latter, he frequently featured white characters and society.

Later work

1897 sketch by Norman B. Wood

Dunbar was prolific during his relatively short career: he wrote a dozen books of poetry, four books of short stories, four novels, lyrics for a musical, and a play.

His first collection of short stories Folks From Dixie (1898), a sometimes "harsh examination of racial prejudice," had favorable reviews.[5]

This was not the case for his first novel The Uncalled (1898), which critics described as "dull and unconvincing".[5] Dunbar explored the spiritual struggles of a white minister Frederick Brent, who had been abandoned by his alcoholic father and raised by a virtuous white spinster, Hester Prime. (Both the minister and woman's name recalled Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which featured a central character named Hester Prynne.)[5] With this novel, Dunbar has been noted as one of the first African Americans to cross the "color line" by writing a work only about white society,[13][page needed] but critics complained about his handling of the material, not his subject. The novel was not a commercial success.

Dunbar's next two novels also explored lives and issues in white culture, and critics found these lacking.[5]

In collaboration with the composer Will Marion Cook and Jesse A. Shipp, who wrote the libretto, Dunbar wrote the lyrics for In Dahomey, the first musical written and performed entirely by African Americans. It was produced on Broadway in 1903; the musical comedy successfully toured England and the United States over a period of four years and was one of the more successful theatrical productions of its time.[14]

Dunbar's essays and poems were published widely in the leading journals of the day, including Harper's Weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, the Denver Post, Current Literature and others. During his life, commentators often noted that Dunbar appeared to be purely black African, at a time when many leading members of the African-American community were notably of mixed race, often with considerable European ancestry.

In 1897 Dunbar traveled to England for a literary tour; he recited his works on the London circuit. He met the young black composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who set some of Dunbar's poems to music. Coleridge-Taylor was influenced by Dunbar to use African and American Negro songs and tunes in future compositions. Also living in London at the time, African-American playwright Henry Francis Downing arranged a joint recital for Dunbar and Coleridge-Taylor, under the patronage of John Hay, the American ambassador to Britain.[15] Downing also lodged Dunbar in London while the poet worked on his first novel, The Uncalled (1898).[16]

Marriage and declining health

Dunbar grave site at Woodland Cemetery

After returning from the United Kingdom, Dunbar married Alice Ruth Moore on March 6, 1898. She was a teacher and poet from New Orleans whom he had met three years earlier.[17] Dunbar called her "the sweetest, smartest little girl I ever saw".[18] A graduate of Straight University (now Dillard University), a historically black college, Moore is best known for her short story entitled "Violets". She and her husband also wrote books of poetry as companion pieces. An account of their love, life and marriage was portrayed in Oak and Ivy, a 2001 play by Kathleen McGhee-Anderson.[19]

In October 1897 Dunbar took a job at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. He and his wife moved to the capital, where they lived in the comfortable LeDroit Park neighborhood. Under the urging of his wife, Dunbar soon left the job to focus on his writing, which he promoted through public readings.

In 1900, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB), then often fatal, and his doctors recommended drinking whisky to alleviate his symptoms. On the advice of his doctors, he moved to Colorado with his wife, as the cold, dry mountain air was considered favorable for TB patients. Dunbar and his wife separated in 1902, but they never divorced. Depression and declining health drove him to a dependence on alcohol, which further damaged his health.

Dunbar returned to Dayton in 1904 to be with his mother. He died of TB on February 9, 1906, at age thirty-three.[20] He was interred in the Woodland Cemetery in Dayton.[21]

Literary style

Dunbar's work is known for its colorful language and a conversational tone, with a brilliant rhetorical structure. These traits were well matched to the tune-writing ability of Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862–1946), with whom he collaborated.[22]

Use of dialect

Dunbar wrote much of his work in conventional English, while using African-American dialect for some of it. Dunbar felt there was something suspect about the marketability of dialect poems, as if blacks were limited to a constrained form of expression not associated with the educated class. One interviewer reported that Dunbar told him, "I am tired, so tired of dialect", though he is also quoted as saying, "my natural speech is dialect" and "my love is for the Negro pieces".[23]

Dunbar credited William Dean Howells with promoting his early success, but was dismayed at the critic's encouragement that he concentrate on dialect poetry. Angered that editors refused to print his more traditional poems, he accused Howells of "[doing] my irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse."[24] Dunbar, was continuing in a literary tradition that used Negro dialect; his predecessors included such writers as Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, and George Washington Cable.[25]

Two brief examples of Dunbar's work, the first in standard English and the second in dialect, demonstrate the diversity of the poet's works:

(From "Dreams")

What dreams we have and how they fly
Like rosy clouds across the sky;
Of wealth, of fame, of sure success,
Of love that comes to cheer and bless;
And how they wither, how they fade,
The waning wealth, the jilting jade —
The fame that for a moment gleams,
Then flies forever, — dreams, ah — dreams!

(From "A Warm Day In Winter")

"Sunshine on de medders,
Greenness on de way;
Dat's de blessed reason
I sing all de day."
Look hyeah! What you axing'?
What meks me so merry?
'Spect to see me sighin'
W'en hit's wa'm in Febawary?

Critical response and legacy

Dunbar on 1975 U.S. postage stamp.

Dunbar became the first African-American poet to earn national distinction and acceptance. The New York Times called him "a true singer of the people — white or black."[26] Frederick Douglass once referred to Dunbar as, "one of the sweetest songsters his race has produced and a man of whom [he hoped] great things."[27]

His friend and writer James Weldon Johnson highly praised Dunbar, writing in The Book of American Negro Poetry:

"Paul Laurence Dunbar stands out as the first poet from the Negro race in the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary distinction in what he wrote, and to maintain a high level of performance. He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form."

[5]

This collection was published in 1931, following the Harlem Renaissance, which led to a great outpouring of literary and artistic works by blacks. They explored new topics, expressing ideas about urban life and migration to the North. In his writing, Johnson also criticized Dunbar for his dialect poems, saying they had fostered stereotypes of blacks as comical or pathetic, and reinforced the restriction that blacks write only about scenes of antebellum plantation life in the South.[23]

Dunbar has continued to influence other writers, lyricists, and composers. Composer William Grant Still used excerpts from four dialect poems by Dunbar as epigraphs for the four movements of his Symphony No. 1 in A-flat, "Afro-American" (1930). The next year it was premiered, the first symphony by an African American to be performed by a major orchestra for a US audience.[28]

Maya Angelou titled her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), from a line in Dunbar's poem "Sympathy," at the suggestion of jazz musician and activist Abbey Lincoln.[29] Angelou said that Dunbar's works had inspired her "writing ambition."[30] She returns to his symbol of a caged bird as a chained slave in much of her writings.[31]

Works of poetry

1899 edition of Poems of Cabin and Field
  • Oak and Ivy (1892)[32]
  • Majors and Minors (1896)[32]
  • Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)[32]
  • "We Wear the Mask" (1896)[32]
  • When Malindy Sings (1896)
  • Poems of Cabin and Field (1899)
  • Lyrics of the Hearthside published (1902), copyright date of 1899
  • The Haunted Oak (1900)
  • In Old Plantation Days (1903)[32]
  • Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905)[32]

Short stories and novels

  • Folks From Dixie (1898), short story collection[5]
  • The Heart of Happy Hollow: A Collection of Stories[33]
  • The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (1900)[33]
  • The Uncalled (1898), novel, available at the Gutenberg Project
  • The Love of Landry "was deemed unconvincing in its presentation of white characters and was dismissed as inferior to Dunbar's tales of blacks."[5]
  • The Fanatics, "about America at the beginning of the Civil War. Its central characters are from white families who differ in their North-South sympathies and spark a dispute in their Ohio community. The Fanatics was a commercial failure upon publication, and in the ensuing years it has continued to be regarded as a superficial, largely uncompelling work."[5]
  • The Sport of the Gods (1902), novel[33]

Articles

Legacy and honors

Numerous schools and places have been named in honor of Dunbar. These include: -Lower schools:

-College buildings:

-Other institutions:

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b Alexander, 17
  2. ^ Alexander, 19
  3. ^ a b c Wagner, 75
  4. ^ a b Best, 13
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Paul Laurence Dunbar", Poetry Foundation
  6. ^ a b Fred Howard (1998). Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers. Courier Dover Publications. p. 560. ISBN 0-486-40297-5.
  7. ^ Wagner, 76
  8. ^ a b Alexander, 38
  9. ^ Alexander, 94
  10. ^ Wagner, 77
  11. ^ Nettels, 80–81
  12. ^ Paul Laurence Dunbar, Printed Material
  13. ^ Wilson, Matthew (2004). Whiteness in the Novels of Charles Chesnutt. Jackson: University of Mississippi.
  14. ^ Riis, Thomas L., Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915. (Smithsonian Institution Press: London, 1989) p. 91.
  15. ^ Roberts, Brian (2012). "A London Legacy of Ira Aldridge: Henry Francis Downing and the Paratheatrical Poetics of Plot and Cast(e)". Modern Drama. 55 (3): 396.
  16. ^ Roberts, Brian (2013). Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. p. 83. ISBN 0813933684.
  17. ^ Wagner, 78
  18. ^ Best, 81
  19. ^ "Color Bind", Review: Oak and Ivy, "Best of St. Louis", Riverfront Times, 14 February 2004
  20. ^ "Biography page at Paul Laurence Dunbar web site". University of Dayton. February 3, 2003.
  21. ^ "Paul Laurence Dunbar". Find a Grave. Retrieved October 17, 2010.
  22. ^ The collaboration is described by Max Morath in I Love You Truly: A Biographical Novel Based on the Life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond (New York: iUniverse, 2008), ISBN 978-0-595-53017-5, p. 17. Morath explicitly cites "The Last Long Rest" and "Poor Little Lamb" (a.k.a. "Sunshine") and alludes to three more songs for which the lyrics are by Dunbar and the music by Jacobs-Bond.
  23. ^ a b Nettels, 83.
  24. ^ Nettels, 82.
  25. ^ Nettels, 73.
  26. ^ Wagner, 105
  27. ^ "http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00486.html?from=../cush/e1214.html&from_nm=Poetry
  28. ^ Still, Judith Anne (1990). William Grant Still: A Voice High-Sounding (1 ed.). Flagstaff, Arizona: The Master-Player Library. ISBN 1-877873-15-2
  29. ^ Hagen, Lyman B. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, Maryland: University Press, 1997: 54. ISBN 0-7618-0621-0
  30. ^ Tate, Claudia. "Maya Angelou". In Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook, Joanne M. Braxton, ed. New York: Oxford Press, 1999: 158. ISBN 0-19-511606-2
  31. ^ Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998: 66. ISBN 0-313-30325-8
  32. ^ a b c d e f Best, 137
  33. ^ a b c d Browse authors: "Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906", Gutenberg Project
  34. ^ Dave Dunbar, "The chant is older than we think", in Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 2010 January 13, Saint Tammany Edition, pp. A1, A10.
  35. ^ Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, National Park Service
  36. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

Works cited

  • Alexander, Eleanor C. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore. New York: New York University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8147-0696-7.
  • Best, Felton O. Crossing the Color Line: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906. Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co., 1996. ISBN 0-7872-2234-8.
  • Nettels, Elsa. Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America. University Press of Kentucky, 1988. ISBN 0-8131-1629-5.
  • Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. University of Illinois Press, 1973. ISBN 0-252-00341-1.

Further reading

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