Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays (LOA #131): The Conjure Woman / The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line / The House ... / uncollected stories / (Library of America) - Hardcover

Chesnutt, Charles W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931082065 ISBN 13: 9781931082068

Publisher: Library of America, 2002

Synopsis

Rejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life.

The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), is a study of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era.

Nine uncollected short stories round out the volume's fiction, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman and two stories that are unavailable in any other edition. Eight essays highlight his prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Before Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, before James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen, Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with searching explorations of the meaning of race and innovative use of African American speech and folklore. Rejecting genteel Victorian hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of Jim Crow with novels and stories of formal clarity-creating, in the process, the modern African American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's work in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, presenting for the first time the full range of his achievement as a writer and social critic.

The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) tells, as no previous novel ever had, of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era, based largely on the Wilmington race riot.

Nine uncollected short stories, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman, round out a selection of the author's fiction. Eight essays highlight Chesnutt's prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself.

The editor of this volume, Werner Sollors, teaches Afro-American Studies and English at Harvard University. His most recent book is Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature.

About the Author:

Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) was America's first great black novelist, the author of such groundbreaking works as The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, and The House Behind the Cedars.

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1931082065
• ISBN 13: 9781931082068
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 939