Authors

In 2002, Werner Sollors edited the Library of America volume Charles W. Chesnutt Stories, Novels and Essays, a much-needed resource. The volume Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (1999), presents all of Chesnutt’s known nonfiction, 77 items in all, from 1881–1930s, on a wide range of topics: race, education, images of blacks in literature, and manners. And their collection of his letters, An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906–1932 (2002) provides another major contribution to the valuable if less comprehensive work before them. Sylvia L. Render edited The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (1974). Richard H. Brodhead edited The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt (1993). His introduction to The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1993) locates Chesnutt’s tales within the conventions of local color realism and particularly within the development of black vernacular voice and emerging fictions detailing black folk life. William L. Andrews brings his deep understanding of Chesnutt to his edition of the Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt (1992). The first full-length biography was written by Chesnutt’s daughter, Helen M. Chesnutt, as Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (1952). Heermance J. Noel’s Charles W. Chesnutt: America’s First Great Black Novelist (1974) is a useful critical biography, as are William L. Andrews’s The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980), Sylvia L. Render’s Charles W. Chesnutt (1980), and Robert B. Stepto’s Charles Chesnutt: The Uncle Julius Stories (1984); and Charles Duncan’s The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt (1998), which explores sensitively what might be called the “rhetoric of elusiveness” in Chesnutt’s career. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers’s Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985) and Jane Campbell’s Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (1986) contain useful contextual material on Chesnutt. A more specialized study is Ernestine Williams Pickens’s Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement (1994). Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (1993) treats Chesnutt at length. Other valuable critical studies include Samira Kawash’s Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (1997), which examines critically and historically representations of racial difference; Henry Wonham’s Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998); Dean McWilliams’s Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, (2002); Matthew Wilson’s Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt (2004); Conscience and Purpose: Fiction and Social Consciousness in Howells, Jewett, Chesnutt, and Cather by Paul R. Petrie (2005); and Charles A. Walls’s Acts of the Imagination: Racial Sentimentalism and the Modern American Novel (Frederick Douglass, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright) (2006). One of Chesnutt’s best scholars is Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., whose Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt (1999) gathers a variety of helpful essays prefaced by a thoughtful introductory essay; selections on Chesnutt’s reputation range from its beginning at the turn of the century to the surge of interest in the 1960s that has continued to the present. In a recent essay, McElrath also thoughtfully contrasts Chesnutt and Howells: “Why Charles Chesnutt is Not a Realist,” American Literary Realism (2000).

Charles W. Chesnutt was the first black fiction writer to earn the respect of white critics. Born to free black parents living in North Carolina, Chesnutt worked as a teacher, school principal, newspaper reporter, accountant, and lawyer before he rose to literary fame in 1887 with his story The Goophered Grapevine. In the fiction collected in The Conjure Woman (1899), Chesnutt used folklore and regional dialects to set a playfully mocking tone. Later fiction dealt more and more with the racial tensions Chesnutt witnessed in post-Civil War America. With seriousness and sensitivity, he depicted characters who suffered when they attempted to pass as white or when they married interracially. Especially noteworthy were The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). In 1928 Chesnutt was awarded a Spingarn Medal for his groundbreaking contribution to the depiction of the "life and struggle of Americans of Negro descent."