Paul Laurence Dunbar Research Paper

Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most popular poets of his day. He was highly regarded for his black dialect poetry, which earned him the title, “poet laureate of his race.” Dunbar’s second book of poetry, Majors and Minors, was even reviewed positively by the famous critic William Dean Howells. However, despite Dunbar’s popularity, he has also been widely criticized for his black dialect poetry. Many scholars and African-Americans have argued that it is an unsympathetic portrait of blackness meant to appease his paying white readership. This thesis discusses the conditions and circumstances that influenced Dunbar to write black dialect poetry. It places the poet’s life and career in the social, economic, and critical context of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

In 1907, Linda Keck Wiggins honored the poet with The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a biography largely gathered from interviews and reminiscences. The definitive text was one of only several written on Dunbar until 1911, and little attention has been paid to the poet ever since. New scholarship on him typically corresponds with significant anniversaries and other relevant times. Nine Dunbar biographies have been published in the last century, but little new information about his life has been revealed since the Wiggins text. Dunbar’s writing, specifically his poetry, has seen rather modest reprinting and is not frequently anthologized.There are, of course, many reasons for Dunbar’s fall from popularity over the last century. Several scholars contend that the poet’s legacy has been overshadowed by that of other prominent blacks within a half-century of his life, such as Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington. These men were famous writers like Dunbar, but had a much greater public presence than the