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Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was a seminal American poet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As the first African-American to gain major praise for his poetry, Dunbar represents the beginning of one of America's greatest literary traditions.
Dunbar real world biography encyclopedia
Dunbar's work would endure, inspire, and direct the authors of the Harlem Renaissance who would succeed him in the twentieth century, most notably Langston Hughes. Dunbar exemplified what Hughes would later outline in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Dunbar's great struggle for recognition as an African-American poet was a struggle to be recognized not as a "black poet" but as "a poet who is black".
Dunbar was not only America's first black poet; he was also the first to protest for equal recognition. Throughout his life, Dunbar struggled to be recognized as a poet belonging to the same tradition as John Keats and William Shakespeare.