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Charles Waddell Chesnutt was a prominent African-American author, who despite living much of his life in the North, spent his formative years in North Carolina. Indeed, many of his stories were set in North Carolina.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1858, he and his family moved when he was eight to North Carolina. Chesnutt spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Fayetteville. He received his education at the Howard School (forerunner of Fayetteville State University), established to educate freed black men. In 1872 Chesnutt became a teacher in Charlotte and moved back to Fayetteville to teach in 1877. Chesnutt met then his wife, Susan Perry, in 1878, at the Howard School. Following the death of the school’s principal, Robert Harris, Chesnutt became the school’s acting principal, in 1880 serving until 1883.
Chesnutt published his first short story, “The Gophered Grapevine,” in The Atlantic Monthly in 1877. He was the first African American to be published in a periodical of such standing. He continued to publish in other periodicals, increasing his notoriety.
By 1883 Chesnutt decided that the post-Reconstruction South would be too perilous a place in which to raise a family. He resigned his position and moved alone to New York City, where he worked as a journalist for the New York Mail and Express. After six months, Chesnutt moved back to his birthplace, Cleveland, where he lived the rest of his life. While in Cleveland, Chesnutt passed the bar and started his own practice.
Over the years, Chesnutt published enough stories that he was able to release them as collections. In 1899 there appeared two collections of short stories: The Conjure Woman and the Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. In this time he also published a biography for the Beacon series of Biographies of Eminent Americans: The Life of Frederick Douglass .
Chesnutt had become so successful that he was able to retire from stenography in the 1890s and focus on his writing. His first three novels, The House Behind the Cedars, published in 1900; The Marrow of Tradition, published in 1901; and Colonel’s Dream, published in 1905, were very successful. Marrow was set in a fictional version of Wilmington during the race riot of 1898. He never completed his last novel, The Quarry before his death in 1932, but it has since been published in unfinished form. The novels addressed the issues of the ‘Color Line’ and the effects it had on those who were one or the other side of the line. He was able to draw on his own experiences since he was of mixed race.
As an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 for his distinguished achievements.
References:
Frances R. Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1978)
Richard Walser, North Carolina in the Short Story (1948)
National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1904)
Library of America website: www.charleschesnutt.org
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