Books by Charles W. Chesnutt

Chesnutt's novel, originally published in 1901, depicts the rise of the white supremacist movement after the failure of southern Reconstruction and led to the bloody tragedy of the Wilmington race riots.

Originally released in 1899, this seminal collection of short stories present the complexities of the Black-American experience in the Postbellum South. Chesnutt's often subversive tales challenge popular representations of racial identity.

Written in 1905, this is a compelling tale of the post-Civil War South's degeneration into a region awash with virulent racist practices against African Americans: segregation, lynchings, disenfranchisement, convict-labor exploitation, and endemic violent repression. The events are powerfully depicted from the point of view of a philanthropic but unreliable southern white colonel.

Published in paperback for the first time, A Business Career is the story of Stella Merwin, a white woman entering the working-class world to discover the truth behind her upper-class father's financial failure. A "New Woman" of the 1890s, Stella joins a stenographer's office and uncovers a life-altering secret that allows her to regain her status and wealth.

The critique of white male society that Charles W. Chesnutt launched in A Marrow of Tradition continues in this novel, one of six manuscripts left unpublished when this highly regarded African American innovator died. Set in Boston society, on a deserted Caribbean island, and in Brazil, Evelyn's Husband is the story of two men in love with the same young woman.

Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favoured by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans.

John Walden, a young black man, decides to pass for white in order to earn what he feels is his share of the American dream. Without sentimentality, this novel probes deeply into the white South's obsessions with race and privilege.

This book collects the letters written between 1906 and 1932 by the African-American novelist and civil rights activist Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). His correspondents included prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance as well as major American political figures Chesnutt sought to influence on behalf of his fellow African Americans.

The first African American fiction writer to earn a national reputation, Charles W. Chesnutt remains best known for his depictions of Southern life before and after the Civil War.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) has been considered by many the major African-American fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance. This book collects essays he wrote from 1899 through 1931, the majority of which concern white racism, and political and literary addresses he made to both white and black audiences from 1881 through 1931.

Fourteen conjure tales by one of America's most influential African American fiction writers.

Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man''s dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century. Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt''s everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt''s journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.

Reassembles the Charles W Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre. This work allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work.