Who is dunbar

This recognition helped Dunbar gain national and international acclaim, and in he embarked on a six-month reading tour of England. He also contributed lyrics to a number of musical reviews. Over the next five years, he would produce three more novels and three short story collections.

Dunbar separated from his wife in , and shortly thereafter he suffered a nervous breakdown and a bout of pneumonia. Although ill, Dunbar continued to write poems. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Physicians diagnosed Paul as having tuberculosis in This diagnosis — in an age without antibiotic medications — disrupted his relationship with Alice.

Paul medicated himself by drinking heavily and developed into an alcoholic; his alcoholism and continued abuse of Alice led her to leave him in While Alice refused to have contact with Paul for the remainder of his life, the couple did not divorce; she retained his name and promoted his writing until her death in Paul, who wrote novels, play, and song lyrics in addition to poetry, lived the last three years of his life with his mother in a house on Summit Street today Paul Laurence Dunbar Street in Dayton, where he died on February 9, Explore This Park.

It is perhaps no wonder that from shortly after his death through the mid-twentieth century, his name was associated with numerous respected institutions in the African-American community. Practically gone now are the various Paul Laurence Dunbar Literary Societies that flourished throughout the country, but the schools and housing projects bearing his name still exist in many cities.

In order for students to appreciate the enduring literary achievement represented by Dunbar's best work, they should be given some sense of the daunting obstacles arrayed against black authors at that time and, accordingly, of the complex constraints placed upon them by white editors and readers alike.

To put it another way, students should be encouraged to consider not just what Dunbar wrote but why he wrote as he did. One cannot overemphasize the fact that Dunbar lived during a period when the access allowed blacks to major white publications was extremely limited.

Although there were a number of important African-American periodicals in existence as well, for the ambitious black author eager to make his or her mark on the mainstream literary landscape, magazines such as Century and the Atlantic Monthly constituted the height of success. All too often, however, editors of these and similar periodicals expected African-American writers dealing with black material to follow the conventions of what has been termed the Plantation Tradition, which dominated the literary representation of black life and culture in the late nineteenth century.

When coupled with the popularity of dialect verse of all kinds at the time, these conventions perhaps best embodied in the fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page exerted tremendous pressure upon aspiring African-American authors. As a result, one should urge students not to search Dunbar's work for outright protest and direct rejection of the dominant racial stereotypes of the day but rather to attend to the subtle use of irony and the often veiled allusions to the dilemmas of race that mark much of his writing.

It is also important to recall that Dunbar wrote at a time when American poetry was in a state of transition. Although Emily Dickinson had died in , her work was virtually unknown until the s, and scant serious attention was paid to Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetic theory or Walt Whitman's free verse innovations.

Alice Moore Dunbar left her husband in , though the couple never officially divorced, and refused any contact with Dunbar for the rest of his life.

His health deteriorating, Dunbar returned home to Dayton and to his mother, Matilda, spending the last three years of his life under her care. Dunbar died on February 9, , and was buried in nearby Woodland Cemetery. During the final ten years of his life, Dunbar wrote prolifically, turning out poetry, short stories, novels, lyrics, and a variety of narrative works.

Although only 33 when he died, his legacy, most notably his dialect poetry, influenced many writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the s. Regarded as one of the leading African American writers of the 20th century, Dunbar and his work continue to fuel academic debates. In recent years, new collections of his work have added more than undiscovered or uncollected poetic and narrative works by Dunbar to the already large body of his writings.

Taken in its entirety, Dunbar's extensive body of work provides a significant representation of African American life at the turn of the twentieth century. Toggle navigation.