Meet the Author
Paul Laurence Dunbar
American · 1872–1906 · Poet and novelist
Portrait: The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920,, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Dayton-born son of formerly enslaved parents, and among the first Black American poets to win a national audience.
1 StoryBites Edition1 Poem
Why read Paul Laurence Dunbar?
Dunbar wrote in two voices, standard English and a Black dialect that won him fame but that he came to feel boxed him in. We Wear the Mask, in standard English, is widely read as describing the smiling face Black Americans had to show a hostile world while hiding their pain. Read it for its tight rhymes and for the double meaning in every smile it describes.
A life in six dates
- 1872Born in Dayton, Ohio
- 1891Graduates from Dayton’s Central High School
- 1893Publishes his first book, Oak and Ivy
- 1895Publishes Majors and Minors, including We Wear the Mask
- 1896Publishes Lyrics of Lowly Life, with an introduction by William Dean Howells
- 1898Marries the writer Alice Ruth Moore
- 1906Dies of tuberculosis in Dayton at 33
Themes across the work
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
Life after ReconstructionDunbar wrote in the 1890s, as Jim Crow laws and racial violence spread, which gives the poem’s hidden pain its weight.
Dialect poetryMagazines and readers of the time wanted dialect verse from Black writers, and Dunbar’s success with it shaped, and limited, how critics saw him.
William Dean HowellsThe influential editor praised Majors and Minors in Harper’s Weekly in 1896, which brought Dunbar national attention.