Paul Laurence Dunbar
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"Paul Laurence Dunbar" was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been Slavery in the United States/slaves in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar started to write as a child and was president of his high school's literary society. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper.

Much of his more popular work in his lifetime was written in the African American Vernacular English/Negro dialect associated with the antebellum South. His work was praised by William Dean Howells, a leading critic associated with the Harper's Weekly, and Dunbar was one of the first African-American writers to establish a national reputation. He wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy, In Dahomey (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway theatre/Broadway; the musical also toured in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Dunbar also wrote in conventional English in other poetry and novels; since the late 20th century, scholars have become more interested in these other works. Suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar died at the age of 33.

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But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core.

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With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. Our horizon is the universe.

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When you play a team like St. X, you have to play your best, ... St. X is just a great team, so if we can just even keep up with them, we're pretty pleased. It means we're doing OK.

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With it all, I cannot help being overwhelmed by self-doubts. I hope there is something worthy in my writings and not merely the novelty of a black face associated with the power to rhyme that has attracted attention.

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I didn't start as a dialect poet, ... talked again and again about poetry.

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People are taking it for granted that [the Negro] ought not to work with his head. And it is so easy for these people among whom we are living to believe this; it flatters and satisfies their self-complacency.

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I simply came to the conclusion that I could write [dialect poetry] as well, if not better, than anybody else I knew of, ... and that by doing so I should gain a hearing. I gained the hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect.

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