Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the most popular American poets of his time, was also the first black poet to attain national and international recognition. Booker T. Washington called him the "Poet Laureate of the Negro race," and William Dean Howells lauded him as a Negro dialect poet who studied the Afro-American "objectively and represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness." He was a master craftsman not only in his use of dialect but in his standard English poems and in much of his fiction. He captured the humor, pathos, and hopeful spirit of a resolute and struggling people in and out of slavery. His skillful handling of rhythm, satire, narrative, and irony places him among the best poets this country has produced.

Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, to...