Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of June 27th
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It is the 178th day of the year, leaving 187 days remaining in 2022.
He wrote his stories, in verse and in prose, in a variety of styles, from Black dialect to traditional romantic sonnets.
He is considered one of the first and finest Black poets in the United States, although his writings are criticized for his sometimes stereotypical portrayals of the lives of Black people in antebellum times.
Both his parents had been enslaved people who moved north after the Civil War, and Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio. When he was 16, he was publishing poems in The (Dayton) Herald. He soon was writing for and editing The Tattler, a short-lived Dayton newspaper.
By the time he was 20, he had published his first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, and was selling it at his job as an elevator operator. His next two volumes, Majors and Minors and Lyrics of Lowly Life, were supported by a mentor, William Dean Howells, an established and influential critic.
Howells particularly encouraged Dunbar to write more poems and stories in Black dialect, although Dunbar preferred more traditional styles of writing.
In his novels, Dunbar often told stories of white people, to middling success. But he remained popular, and his poetry readings were well attended.
Only in a few stories and in his last novel did Dunbar address racism or disquiet in the Black community. His first book of short stories, Folks From Dixie, was described as a "harsh examination of racial prejudice. His last novel, The Sport of the Gods, described the life of a Black family who moved from the rural South to the urban North.
Dunbar, who suffered health problems throughout his life, died in 1906 from tuberculosis.
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