roduced James Newton Matthew, who was to become another of his champions. For starters, Matthews wrote to an Illinois newspaper singing Dunbar's praises, and Matthews's letter was widely reprinted in other newspapers across the land. One of the people who read of Dunbar was poet James Whitcomb Riley. Intrigued, Riley read numerous poems by Dunbar, and he, too, started singing the young poet's praises. Henry A. Toby helped his distribute Oak and Ivy and sent him money from time to time. Toby and Thatcher then collaborated in helping Dunbar to publish in 1895. The "Majors" were complex poems written in standard English, and the "Minors" were dialect poems. The standard English poems absorbed most of his attention during his years. (Strickland, 96) On Dunbar's twenty-forth birthday, he received an unexpected gift: The prestigious journal Harper's Weekly published an essay by novelist and celebrated literary critic. William Dean Howells, praising Dunbar's poetry. At the time, Dunbar was till working as an elevator operator in a hotel in Dayton, Ohio. Afterward, Dunbar was widely recognized as the first important African-American poet, and according to Mabel Smythe (1976, p. 48), he had a greater impact than any other African-American writer of his time. More than two decades later, James Weldon Johnson called him the first true African-American master of writing and recognized him as the first to earn and keep high honors for what he wrote (1922, p.34).
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