Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) We Wear the Mask LINKS Paul Laurence Dunbar Homepage http://www.udayton.edu/~dunbar/ Maintained by the Black Alumni Chronicle of the University of Dayton, this site contains a biography of Dunbar, a collection of his poems, photographs of Dunbar and his home, as well as a list of links to related sites. University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative American Verse Project http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/amverse/ This site's "Bibliography to American Poetry" contains links to online versions of texts by many American poets, including Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, and When Malindy Sings. BIOGRAPHY Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) The son of former slaves, Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, where he graduated from Dayton High School (1891) and worked for two years as an elevator operator. In 1894, he worked in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exhibition. His first verse collection, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. William Dean Howells, an eminent editor, author, and critic, encouraged him to write and had him join a Lecture Bureau in 1896. Dunbar read his own works in the United States and traveled to England in 1897. While Dunbar maintained that African American poetry was not much different from white (and wrote many poems in standard English), he often wrote poems in black dialect that seemed to cater to the racial stereotypes of his white audience. He died of tuberculosis in 1906. His complete works appear in The Dunbar Reader (1975).