From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Born in Dayton, Ohio, seven years after the end of the Civil War to two formerly enslaved Kentucky natives, Paul Laurence Dunbar was initially educated by his mother, who encouraged his early interest in literature. He eventually enrolled at Dayton’s Central High, where he was editor of the school paper and the class poet. While still a student, he also established a short-lived political paper, Dayton Tattler, which supported the Republican Party and covered the concerns of the city’s Black Americans. The friend and classmate who operated the printing press was none other than future aviator Orville Wright.

The two most famous members of Dayton Central High’s Class of ’90 didn’t actually graduate in 1890, though. Orville Wright dropped out of school his senior year, after the death of his mother, and Dunbar received his diploma in 1891 because he had to retake a math class. “I was the only Negro in the class [of 27 students] and apparently popular,” Dunbar recalled. “My chums encouraged me. My teachers encouraged me.” His first biographer learned that Paul helped Orville with his writing assignments and Orville returned the favor with math lessons.

Over the next few years, Dunbar worked as an elevator operator and, briefly, in Chicago as a clerk to Frederick Douglass. In 1893 Dunbar self-published his first collection of poems, hand-sold every copy, and earned back his investment. Two years later, this time sponsored by white patrons, his second book, Majors and Minors, was published by a regional printer and eventually fell into the hands of William Dean Howells, the influential editor, novelist, and critic. Howells wrote an appreciation in Harper’s Magazine, praising Dunbar as “the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically.” (Many commentators made much of the fact that Dunbar’s ancestry was wholly African rather than multiracial.)

The review made Dunbar suddenly—and unexpectedly—famous. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the young poet wrote Howells, “Now from the depths of my heart I want to thank you. You yourself do not know what you have done for me.” In the collection that Howells reviewed, the “majors” were the poems written in standard English; the “minors” were dialect pieces, many of them humorous. Howell clearly favored and highlighted the minors, and the result was popular demand for Dunbar’s dialect poems at the expense of his other work. “I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them to listen to me,” he grudgingly told fellow writer James Weldon Johnson.

Still, his more “traditional” poems and stories found their audience, and in recent decades they have begun to receive renewed attention. Earlier this month, we featured one of his satirical political works, “Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker,” as our Story of the Week  selection, and you can read here, along with an introduction detailing his differences—and eventual reconciliation—with Booker T. Washington.

Read “Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar