The Sport of the Gods

"No poet in the tradition was more crucial in the shaping of a distinct African American poetic diction or voice than he. Put simply, Paul Laurence Dunbar during his lifetime was the most famous black writer in the world...Had Dunbar lived even half as long as Du Bois...we can only imagine how different would have been the shape of the Harlem Renaissance and indeed the shape of African American literature itself." -- Henry Louis Gates