Who is charles w chesnutt

Used by permission of the publisher. Chesnutt, Charles W. When he was eight years old, Chesnutt's parents returned to Fayetteville, where Charles worked part-time in the family grocery store and attended a school founded by the Freedmen's Bureau. In financial necessity forced him to begin a teaching career in Charlotte, N. He returned to Fayetteville in , married a year later, and by had become principal of the Fayetteville State Normal School for Negroes.

Meanwhile he continued to pursue private studies of the English classics, foreign languages, music, and stenography. The essays and speeches in this volume are not, however, limited to polemical writings. An educator, attorney, and man of letters with wide-ranging interests, Chesnutt stands as a humanist addressing subjects of universal interest, including the novels of George Meredith, the accomplishments of Samuel Johnson, and the relationship between literature and life.

Until now these pieces were almost completely inaccessible. The present volume is an indepensable contribution to Charles Chesnutt and African-American historical and literary scholarship.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt died on November 15, Toggle navigation. Charles W. Chesnutt From Ohio History Central. Jump to: navigation , search. A photograph of Chesnuttat age Chesnutt, Helen M. Foner, Eric. That heritage led Chesnutt to be so light-skinned that he could have passed as white if he chose. Although he self-identified as African American throughout his life, he detailed in his journal that he was indeed frequently mistaken to be white.

In his literary career, Chesnutt also straddled the boundaries between genres. Chesnutt also wrote short stories set in the late 19 th century after the conclusion of the war.

Collected in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line , these stories examine and complicate histories of race and identity, segregation and community in the period that historians have called the lowest point of post-Civil War African American life.

Marrow , his best novel, originated with the misrepresented and forgotten Wilmington NC coup and massacre. From that starting point Chesnutt crafted a novel that encompasses the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction, the realities of segregation and lynching, and the divisions and interconnections of American communities, culminating in tragic yet still hopeful visions of the national future.