Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), poet and novelist, was the first African American author to gain national recognition and a wide popular audience.

Born June 27, 1872, the son of a former slave in Dayton, Ohio, Paul Laurence Dunbar achieved a formal education through high school, graduating in 1891. He had served as editor of the school paper and as class poet. Unable to go to college, Dunbar worked as an elevator operator. He published his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy, in 1893 at his own expense, and his second, Majors and Minors, 2 years later. Seeing the second book, William Dean Howells, then one of America's most distinguished literary critics, urged the young poet to concentrate on dialect verse.

With the 1896 publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life, for which Howells wrote a laudatory preface, Dunbar's professional career got an auspicious start. Demand for his work was soon sufficient to enable him...