The Charles W. Chesnutt Page


( 1858-1932 )


Major Works
The Conjure Woman ( 1899 ).
Reprinted with an introduction by Robert M. Farnsworth. Michigan, 1969.
On Line from Documenting the South.
Includes " The Goophered Grapevine " Chesnutt's first published story ( 1887 ).
Frederick Douglass: A Biography ( 1899 ). Reprinted by Johnson, 1970.
The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line ( 1899 ): The House Behind the Cedars ( 1900 ). A novel. Reprinted with an introduction by Donald B. Gibson. Penguin, 1993. On Line
The Marrow of Tradition ( 1901 ). A novel. Reprinted with an introduction by Robert M.Farnsworth. Michigan, 1969.
The Colonel's Dream ( 1905 ). A novel.
Uncollected Stories:
Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt. Edited by William L. Andrews. Mentor, 1992.
The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Edited by Richard H. Brodhead. Duke, 1993.
To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt,1885-1905. Edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Robert C. Leitz, III. Princeton, 1997.

About Chesnutt
William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles Chesnutt. Louisiana State, 1980.
Sylvia Lyons Render, Charles W. Chesnutt. Twayne, 1980.
Matthew Wilson, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
William Dean Howells, the " Dean of American Letters " and the author of several distinguished novels, reviewed Chesnutt's stories most favorably in 1900 (Atlantic Monthly 85 pp.699-701).

Back to African American Literature