Charles Chesnutt

Charles Chesnutt was born to a free, mixed-race couple who had left their native city of Fayetteville, North Carolina to live in Cleveland, Ohio just before the start of the American Civil War. Chesnutt was considered Black, even though he had majority European ancestry and could “pass” as white—although he never chose to, instead identifying strongly with the Black community. Although born in Ohio, Chesnutt spent most of his early life in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where his parents moved back to following the end of the Civil War. He worked as a teacher, then became principal of the State Colored Normal School. However, racism in the South at the time led him to move back to his birth city of Cleveland, Ohio, along with his wife and children, where he worked as a clerk while studying to become a lawyer. His great ambition was to become a full-time writer, and he wrote stories and novels in his spare time. Chesnutt published two short story collections: The Conjure Woman (1899), which depicted life under slavery, and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), which depicted issues of racial identity. Chesnutt also published three novels: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). Chesnutt sometimes found it difficult to find a wide readership in his lifetime due to his own racial identity as well as the anti-racist themes of his work. His final two novels, Paul Marchand, F.M.C (1921) and The Quarry (1928), were only published posthumously due to their subversive treatment of racial identity.