Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Quarles presents Douglass's own words, the views of his contemporaries, and analyses in retrospect by leading historians and political scientists to create a three-fold perspective.

Bringing to life the culture of Harlem in the 1920s, Charles Chestnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and aesthetic milieu of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters, The Quarry is peopled with so many figures of the time - including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey - that it constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American history. Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man, whose adoptive black parents are determined that he become a leader in the black community. Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.

The 77 works included in this volume comprise all of Chesnutt's known works of nonfiction, 38 of which are reprinted here for the first time. They reveal an ardent and often outraged spokesman for the African American whose militancy increased to such a degree that, by 1903, he had more in common with W. E. B. Du Bois than Booker T. Washington. He was, however, a lifelong integrationist and even an advocate of "race amalgamation," seeing interracial marriage as the ultimate means of solving "the Negro Problem," as it was termed at the end of the century. That he championed the African American during the Jim Crow era while opposing Black Nationalism and other "race pride" movements attests to the way Chesnutt defined himself as a controversial figure, in his time and ours.

"It is the turn of the twentieth century. Having achieved financial success in New York, Colonel French returns to his hometown of Clarendon, NC, determined to use his great wealth to bring about racial harmony through economic prosperity, in a south still reeling from the social upheaval of the Civil War. He devises schemes to bring jobs to all members of the community - without regard to 'race' - but underestimates the power of deep-seated racism to undermine his efforts. He fails horribly and loses his most cherished loved ones in the process, perhaps because he himself could not fully dispel his own Southern values."--Page of cover.

The author writes in the "white life" style that some African-American writers adopted when they wrote about personal experiences about their lives and others.

This is one of the authors "white life " fiction books which relates the African American experience in the U.S.

"This book collects the letters written between 1906 and 1932 by novelist and civil rights activist Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). Between 1885 and 1905, this pioneer in the African-American literary tradition published three novels, two books of short stories, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and many short stories and essays in prestigious periodicals - at the same time managing a stenography and court reporting firm in Cleveland, Ohio. His works, which featured the experiences of African Americans in the ante- and post-bellum period, received favorable reviews. But they did not find a large and appreciative audience until many decades later when both the civil rights movement and increased interest in the African-American contribution to American cultural life resulted in the "rediscovering" of Chesnutt's large body of writings."--BOOK JACKET.

Publisher description: 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. 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.

"This edition of Charles W. Chesnutt's 1901 novel about racial conflict in a southern town features an extensive selection of materials that place the work in its historical context. Organized thematically, these materials explore caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction; postbellum laws and lynching; the 1898 Wilmington riot on which the narrative is based; and the fin de siecle culture of segregation. The thematic sections are rich with documents such as letters, photographs, editorials, speeches, legal decisions, journalism, and essays from leading periodicals of the era. The writers represented include such well-known figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as fascinating, half-forgotten characters like the black newspaper editor Alexander Manly and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon."--BOOK JACKET.

Contains: [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]( The Negro Speaks of Rivers from Exodus from the King James Bible African American Freedom Songs from Driving Miss Daisy Twain and Huck finn: Two Commentaries The Passing of Grandison Mark Twain (biographical sketch)