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society that Charles W. Chesnutt launched in A Marrow of Tradition continues in this novel, one of six manuscripts left unpublished when this highly regarded African American innovator died.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.