The following year, he was invited to read his poetry at the World’s Fair in Chicago. One of the people in the audience wrote an article about his poetry that was printed in newspapers around the country.ĭunbar published his first poetry collection, Oak and Ivy, in 1892, and he sold it himself to elevator passengers in his elevator. He read a poem that so impressed the audience that they invited him to become a member of the association. In 1862, the Western Association of Writers had a meeting in Dayton, and Dunbar’s high school English teacher arranged for him to give the welcoming address. He read and wrote poems while standing in the elevator stall, waiting for passengers. After high school, none of the newspapers in town would give him a job, so he supported himself as an elevator operator. His mother had been a slave until the end of the Civil War.ĭunbar was the only black student at his high school in Dayton, Ohio, but he was elected president of his class and editor of the high school newspaper. His father was a slave who had fled the South on the Underground Railroad and later fought in the Civil War as a Union soldier. He was the one of the first African-American writers to gain popular recognition for his work. It’s the birthday of the poet and short story writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in Dayton, Ohio (1872). He was killed in a dune buggy accident on Fire Island, New York, when he was 40 years old. He described his work as “I do this I do that” poetry because he felt it read like a diary.
He drew poetic inspiration from the paintings of his friends Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Jackson Pollock, as well as other non-literary sources like free-form jazz. He also served as editor for Art News magazine from 1953 to 1955, and often contributed art criticism to the magazine. He was interested in the visual as well as the literary arts, and got a job at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, first at the front desk, where he would write poems in between selling postcards and tickets, and later as a curator. He was actually born in March, but his parents lied to him and said he was born three months later, to keep him from finding out he was conceived before they were married. It’s the birthday of American poet Frank O’Hara, born Francis Russell O’Hara in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, or rather, it’s the day that Frank O’Hara celebrates his birthday.
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