is decision to choose this career was remarkable. Slavery may have ended, but attitudes were still antagonistic to young blacks moving into new fields. At this time, political efforts were well underway to disenfranchise blacks as much as possible and so to reverse what the end of slavery had encouraged. This was a new era of segregated facilities and growing discrimination, but Dunbar was able to succeed in a profession generally closed to his race. Having achieved considerable local celebrity, he collected his poems together in a book, Oak and Ivy, published with borrowed money in 1892. The major influences then working on Dunbar and his poems were evident in this "mixture of poems in literary English in the style of Longfellow and poems in dialect in the style of Riley" (Revell 43), and numerous aspiring obscure poets of the age were producing works in the same manner. However, even these juvenile poems by Dunbar were above average. Dunbar intended to sell the book by subscription and by individual sales at public readings.
As noted, this era was the low point in the post-Civil War history of blacks:
Dunbar faced a cultural environment that was repressive yet hopeful, segregated but not isolated, hostile but stimulating. Even those excluded from the mainstream businesses were still
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