Paul Laurence Dunbar was "the most promising young colored man" in nineteenth-century America, according to Frederick Douglass, and subsequently became one of the most controversial. His plantation lyrics, written while he was an elevator boy in Ohio, established Dunbar as the premier writer of dialect poetry and garnered him international recognition. More than a vernacular lyricist, Dunbar was also a master of classical poetic forms, and helped demonstrate to post-Civil War America that literary genius did not solely reside in artists of European descent. William Dean Howells called Dunbar's acclaimed dialect poems "evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all."