Background
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, United States, the son of former slaves.
(2015 Reprint of 1902 Edition. Full facsimile of the origi...)
2015 Reprint of 1902 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In "The Sport of the Gods", first published in 1902, Dunbar examines the life of urban Black Americans. Forced to leave the South, a family falls apart amid the harsh realities of Northern inner city life in this examination of the forces that extinguish the dreams of African Americans. It remains a compelling commentary on the life of African-Americans after the abolition of slavery and landmark representation of black life in African-American literature.
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Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, United States, the son of former slaves.
Dunbar was the only African-American student during the years he attended Dayton's Central High School, and he participated actively as a student. During high school, he was both the editor of the school newspaper and class president, as well as the president of the school literary society.
Paul Laurence Dunbar published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy (1893), at his own expense while working as an elevator operator and sold copies to his passengers to pay for the printing. His second volume, Majors and Minors (1895), attracted the favourable notice of the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who also introduced Dunbar’s next book, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), which contained some of the finest verses of the first two volumes.
A vogue sprang up for Dunbar’s poems; he read them to audiences in the U. S. and England, and when he returned from abroad he was given a job in the reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. (1897–98). He turned to fiction as well as verse, publishing four collections of short stories and four novels before his early death. Writing for a largely white readership, Dunbar made use of the then current plantation tradition in both his stories and his poems, depicting the pre-Civil War South in pastoral, idyllic tones. Only in a few of his later stories did a suggestion of racial disquiet appear.
His first three novels—including The Uncalled (1898), which reflected his own spiritual problems—were about white characters. His last, sometimes considered his best, was The Sport of the Gods (1902), concerning an uprooted black family in the urban North.
In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar's standing as America's foremost black poet seemed assured, and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements in black American literature. In the ensuing decades, however, his reputation was damaged by scholars questioning the validity of his often stereotypic characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to sustain an anti-racist stance. Among his most vehement detractors from this period was Victor Lawson, whose Dunbar Critically Examined remains a provocative, if overly aggressive, study.
More recently Dunbar's stature has increased markedly. He is once again regarded as America's first great black poet, and his standard English poems are now, perhaps surprisingly, prized as his greatest achievements in verse.
(2015 Reprint of 1902 Edition. Full facsimile of the origi...)
After returning from the United Kingdom, Dunbar married to Alice Ruth Moore, on March 6, 1898.