Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932)--African-American educator,
lawyer, and activist--was the most prominent black prose author of
his day. In both his fiction and his essays, he addressed the thorny
issues of the "color line" and racism in an outspoken way. Despite
the critical acclaim resulting from several works of fiction and
non-fiction published between 1898 and 1905, he was unable to make a
living as an author. He kept writing, however, and several works
which were not published during his lifetime have been rediscovered
(and published) in recent years. He was awarded the Springarn Medal
for distinguished literary achievement by the NAACP in 1928. The
library at Fayetteville State University, in North Carolina, is
named after him.
The Wife of His Youth (1899) was Chesnutt's second collection of
short stories, drawing upon his mixed race heritage. These deal
largely with race relations, the far-reaching effects of Jim
Crow laws, and color prejudice among African Americans toward
darker-skinned blacks. Eric J. Sundquist wrote: "Chesnutt's
color-line stories, like his conjure tales, are at their best
haunting, psychologically and philosophically astute studies of the
nation's betrayal of the promise of racial equality and its descent
into a brutal world of segregation. [He] made the family a means of
delineating America's racial crisis, during slavery and afterward."
For our PG edition, I have added three of Chesnutt's essays on the
"color line" in an Appendix to this collection.
Suzanne Shell,
Project Gutenberg Project Manager