From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 – November 15, 1932) was an African American author and political activist best known for novels and short stories exploring racism and other social themes.

Contents 1 Life 2 Writing 3 Selected works 4 Published as 5 External links 6 References 7 See also

Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Andrew Jackson and Ann Maria (Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free persons of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandfather was a white slaveholder. Chesnutt was of mixed race but could pass with relative ease for a white man, although he never chose to pass. During that time in America he was considered "legally" black. Issues of miscegenation, "passing", and racial identity would influence his writing throughout his career.

After the Civil War, the family returned to Fayetteville, where they ran a grocery store. Charles entered school at the age of eight, and at sixteen, became a student-teacher to help support his family following his mother's death. He continued to study and teach, eventually becoming assistant principal of the normal school in Fayetteville.

In 1878, he married Susan Perry and moved to New York City, where he hoped to escape the prejudice and poverty of the South and pursue a literary career. After six months he moved back to Cleveland, where he studied for and passed the bar exam in 1887. He had also learned stenography as a young man in North Carolina, and he established a lucrative stenography business.

While living in Cleveland, he began writing stories which appeared in various magazines including, The Atlantic Monthly, where he published his first short story, "The Goophered Grapevine" in August 1887. His first book, a collection of short stories entitled The Conjure Woman, was published in 1899. He continued writing short stories, and a biography of Frederick Douglass. He also wrote several full-length novels and appeared on the lecture circuit.

Although his stories met with critical acclaim, poor sales of his novels doomed his literary career. He devoted himself to his stenography business and, increasingly, to social and political activism. He served on the General Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Working side-by-side with W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, he became one of the era's most prominent activists and commentators. In 1928, he received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his life's work.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt died in 1932 and was interred in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery.

Chesnutt's style and subject matter place him in the local color school of American writing. Some scholars argue that his short stories (e.g., "The Wife of His Youth") are examples of American realism. In its style, setting in the pre-war plantations of the South, and its use of dialect, The Conjure Woman is reminiscent of the works of Joel Chandler Harris, but differs in its pointed commentary on the institution of slavery. Set in a rapidly receding past, the stories are written as frame narratives with an outer frame story told by John, a white northerner who has bought a North Carolina vineyard after the Civil War, that sets up a situation in which John and his wife Annie listen to a tale recounted by Julius, a former slave who now works for them. The inner frame narratives are recounted in dialect by Julius, and often describe events from slave times using supernatural elements like haunting, transfiguration, and conjuring that are typical of folk tales and also symbolic of the brutality of the slave system. It can be argued that the stories were not calculated to challenge white readers' assumptions, since neither Chesnutt nor his publishers revealed his race, though the symbolic critiques of slavery were surely not lost on some readers. Although only seven of his conjure tales were collected in original The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt wrote a total of fourteen tales that were recently collected in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales.

The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a fictionalized account of the Wilmington Race Riot, marked a turning point for Chesnutt's writing. His early 20th-century works address political issues more directly, and confront uncomfortable topics like racial "passing", lynching, and miscegenation. Many reviewers condemned the novel's overt politics, and even Chesnutt supporters like William Dean Howells openly regretted its "bitter, bitter" tone. Middle-class white readers who had been the core audience for Chesnutt's earlier works found the novel's content shocking and, for some, offensive, and it sold poorly.

The Harlem Renaissance eclipsed much of Chesnutt's remaining literary reputation. Regarded as an old-fashioned writer who, some believed, pandered to racial stereotypes, Chesnutt was relegated to minor status. A long process of critical discussion and re-evaluation starting in the 1960s revived his reputation. In particular, critics have focused on his complex narrative technique, subtlety, and use of irony. Several of his novels have been published posthumously. In 2001, the Library of America added a major collection of Chesnutt's fiction and non-fiction to its series of important American authors.

• The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales (1899)
• The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899)
• Frederick Douglass (1899)
• The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
• The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
• The Colonel's Dream (1905)
• Mandy Oxendine (written in the 1890s; first published in 1997)
• Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (written in 1921; first published 1998, University Press of Mississippi)
• A Business Career (written in the 1890s; first published 2005, University Press of Mississippi)
• Evelyn's Husband (first published 2005, University Press of Mississippi)

• Stories, Novels And Essays: The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, Uncollected Stories, Selected Essays (Werner Sollors, ed.) (Library of America, 2002) ISBN 978-1-93108206-8.

• Works by Charles Chesnutt at Project Gutenberg
• Collection of Chesnutt E-Texts at the University of North Carolina
• Charles W. Chesnutt at Library of America
• Chesnutt Literary Web at Rutgers University
• The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive
• Dramatization on VHS of Chesnutt's "Sister Becky's Pickaninny"

• The Anger and the Irony. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on January 16, 2006.
• Charles Chesnutt biography. Library of America website. Retrieved on April 19, 2007.
• Charles Chesnutt biography. Ohioana Authors. Retrieved on April 19, 2007.
• Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Retrieved on April 19, 2007.
• Roe, Jae H. "Keeping an 'old wound' alive: 'The Marrow of Tradition' and the legacy of Wilmington. African American Review, Vol. 33, 1999.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton, 2004.

• African American literature