ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Dunbar was the only black student in his graduating class at Central High School in Dayton. (Airplane co-inventor Orville Wright was a classmate.) Sci said teachers recognized Dunbar’s talents and pushed him to pursue his passion for writing. He edited his school’s newspaper and was president of its literary society.

Detailed explanation-2: -He turned to fiction as well as verse, publishing four collections of short stories and four novels before his early death. Writing for a largely white readership, Dunbar made use of the then current plantation tradition in both his stories and his poems, depicting the pre-Civil War South in pastoral, idyllic tones.

Detailed explanation-3: -In Oak and Ivy Dunbar included his earliest dialect poems and many works in standard English. Among the latter is one of his most popular poems, “Sympathy, ” in which he expresses, in somber tone, the plight of Black people in American society.

Detailed explanation-4: -Depression and declining health drove him to a dependence on alcohol, which further damaged his health. Dunbar returned to Dayton in 1904 to be with his mother. He died of tuberculosis on February 9, 1906, at the age of 33. He was interred in the Woodland Cemetery in Dayton.