Page:The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race (1919).djvu/18

 PAUL LAWRENCE DUNBAR

AUL LAWRENCE DUNBAR, Poet, is well known, as ought to be, to all Negroes. His songs in dialect and in plain English are known and quoted by all English speaking people. Many of the pieces have been set to music and are sung with remarkable pathos. "Poor Li'l Lamb," and "Seen Mali Lady Home Las' Night," to quote two of the well known songs, are applauded by all grades of audiences throughout the land.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872. He was named Paul after the famous apostle in the scripture and Lawrence after a friend of his parents. The poet is said to have written his first verse when he was seven years old. Paul was a very bashful boy, but he had courage enough to take his poems to his teacher, who encouraged him. His favorite studies were, grammar, spelling and literature. He edited the High School Times, a monthly school paper in the Steel High School of Dayton, where Dunbar was a pupil and from which he was graduated with honors in 1891.

Dunbar went out from school to earn his bread as best he may. His father had died, the support of home therefore fell on the boy, who was none too sound in health. He had aided his mother with the washing and had done such odd jobs as he could find. All he could find as a graduate from the High School was the part as elevator boy in the Callahan Building of Dayton. But he made the best of it, using every spare moment to study or to write.

He soon triumphed over his hardships, publishing his poems in the best magazines of the country, appearing before the most select audiences both in this country and in England and numbering among his friends such persons as James Whitcomb Riley, William Dean Howell, John Hay, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, R. R. Moton, and Booker T. Washington.

The following are favorite lines :