Chesnutt, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was America's first important African-American author, and earned a reputation for both his socially conscious work and his literary innovation. Born in Cleveland to free black parents, he was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and travelled throughout the south, as well as New York and Washington, D.C., before settling in Cleveland with his wife. He had worked as a teacher, and in Cleveland started a successful stenography business, learned law, and passed the bar exam. Chesnutt published numerous short stories and articles, and eventually wrote several novels, including The Conjure Woman (1899). He sought to entertain and educate, and his themes of racial prejudice and miscegnation led to critical appreciation of his work.

African American author, first African American fiction writer to receive serious attention.

Cleveland, Ohio court reporter, novelist and short story writer. He was the first Black novelist and short story writer to win recognition on a nationwide scale.

African American novelist and lawyer; second principal of State Colored Normal School, Fayetteville, N.C.

Author.

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Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first African American novelist and short story writer to gain national distinction in the United States before 1900.

Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20, 1858, the son of Andrew Jackson and Maria Sampson Chesnutt, who had come from North Carolina to Cleveland as "free persons of color" in a covered wagon two years earlier. After he was discharged from service in the American Civil War, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt remained in his native North Carolina and his Cleveland family moved there. Charles Chesnutt was educated in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and at the age of 16 began teaching in small country schools. Constantly engaged in self study, he mastered in Latin, Greek, and shorthand.

In 1882, at the age of 25, Chesnutt went to New York City and worked as a newspaper reporter. Six months later, he returned to Cleveland and worked as a clerk while studying law. Although he never actually practiced law, he remained in the field by becoming a court reporter.

Chesnutt found time to write, and he became a master in the difficult art of short story writing. Starting in 1887, he had seven short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the leading magazines of the day. In 1899 the Houghton Mifflin Company published a collection of his stories under the title The Conjure Woman . The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line appeared in 1899 also and received most complimentary reviews. In quick succession, other novels followed: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow Tradition (1901), The Colonel's Dream (1905), and several others. He was a frequent contributor to magazines, writing serious articles on various phases of race relations in America.

The work of Chesnutt brought the African American experience into serious recognition on the basis of merit. His experiences in the South during the difficult period of Reconstruction furnished the inspiration and theme for his writings. The bitter heritage of slavery, the clash of races, the striving of the disadvantaged created dramatic situations, and he depicted them with the pen of a master. With the passing of the generation that followed the American Civil War, interest in the type of literature created by Chesnutt had declined by 1910. Chesnutt died on November 15, 1932.