"We Wear the Mask" is an 1895 poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. It is generally considered one of his most famous works and has been cited by several scholars as his best poem. The poem appeared in Dunbar's second volume of poetry. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906) was an American poet. Born to freed slaves, he became one of the most prominent African-American poets of his time in the 1890s. "We Wear the Mask" was first published in Dunbar's 1895 Majors and Minors, which was his second volume of poems.