Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

By 1895, Dunbar’s poems began appearing in major national newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times. With the help of friends, he published the second collection, Majors and Minors (1895). The poems written in standard English were called “majors," and those in dialect were termed “minors.” Although the “major” poems outnumber those written in dialect, it was the dialect poems that brought Dunbar the most attention.

Harlem renaissance: Number of black writers emerging.

Several times, Langston Hughes said that Dunbar had inspired his writing.

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".