A 1901 novel about racial conflict in a Southern town, this edition of Marrow of Tradition explores caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction along with postbellum laws and lynching, and the 1898 Wilmington riot to highlight the culture of segregation experienced in this time.

The Marrow of Tradition (Bedford Cultural Editions)

Literature & Fiction

Charles W. Chesnutt

United States

Bedford/St.Martin's

Charles W. Chesnutt was a prominent African-American writer, lawyer, and political activist. Chesnutt was a prolific author and his books were notable for exploring the racial and social issues in the American South after the Civil War. Chesnutt also wrote one of the best known biographies on Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Johnson Reprint Corp

A stirring tale of racial confrontation in a reconstructionist Southern town, first published in 1901

The Marrow of Tradition (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

Reference

Ann Arbor Paperbacks

First published in 1900 during an era when many white American leaders waxed hysterical about the threat to "Anglo-Saxon civilization" posed by racial intermixing, The House Behind the Cedars sensitively explores the lives and fates of John and Rena Walden, two young African-Americans who decide to cross the color line in order to claim their share of the American dream.

The House Behind the Cedars

Thorndike Press

The first African American fiction writer to earn a national reputation, Charles W. Chesnutt remains best known for his depictions of Southern life before and after the Civil War. But he also produced a large body of what might best be called his “Northern” writings, and those works, taken together, describe the intriguing ways in which America was reshaping itself at the turn of the last century. The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt collects for the first time eighteen Chesnutt stories—several of them first appearing in Northern magazines or newspapers—that portray life in the North in the period between the Civil War and World War I. Living in Ohio from 1883 until his death in 1932, Chesnutt witnessed and wrote about the social, cultural, and racial upheavals taking place in the North during a crucial period of American history. His Northern stories thus reflect his vision of a newly reconstituted America, one recommitted to the ideals of freedom and economic opportunity inherent in our national heritage. The stories, compiled and edited with critical introductions to each by Professor Charles Duncan, offer a new Chesnutt, one fascinated by the evolution of America into an urban, multiracial, economically driven democracy. The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt presents richly imagined characters, both black and white, working to make better lives for themselves in the turbulent and stimulating universe of the turn-of-the-century North. Indeed, Chesnutt stands virtually alone as the first African American chronicler of Northern culture, anticipating such figures as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. This critical edition of The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt is a significant addition to the body of African American literature.

Northern Stories Of Charles W. Chesnutt

Ohio University Press

The first African American fiction writer to earn a national reputation, Charles W. Chesnutt remains best known for his depictions of Southern life before and after the Civil War. But he also produced a large body of what might best be called his “Northern” writings, and those works, taken together, describe the intriguing ways in which America was reshaping itself at the turn of the last century.The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt collects for the first time eighteen Chesnutt stories—several of them first appearing in Northern magazines or newspapers—that portray life in the North in the period between the Civil War and World War I. Living in Ohio from 1883 until his death in 1932, Chesnutt witnessed and wrote about the social, cultural, and racial upheavals taking place in the North during a crucial period of American history. His Northern stories thus reflect his vision of a newly reconstituted America, one recommitted to the ideals of freedom and economic opportunity inherent in our national heritage.The stories, compiled and edited with critical introductions to each by Professor Charles Duncan, offer a new Chesnutt, one fascinated by the evolution of America into an urban, multiracial, economically driven democracy.The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt presents richly imagined characters, both black and white, working to make better lives for themselves in the turbulent and stimulating universe of the turn-of-the-century North. Indeed, Chesnutt stands virtually alone as the first African American chronicler of Northern culture, anticipating such figures as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. This critical edition of The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt is a significant addition to the body of African American literature.

The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt

The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

Howard University Press

The Colonel's Dream

General Books

The Colonel’s Dream

RecordedBooks

In The House Behind the Cedars, a novel about two African Americans who pass for white in post-Civil War North Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt introduces a striking new hero in American fiction of the color line: John Walden, a young black man who decides to pass for white in order to earn what he feels is his rightful share of the American dream. Without sentimentality, Chesnutt's novel probes deeper than any before it into the white South's obsessions with race and privilege and still stands as one of the most authoritative and important explorations of miscegenation in all of American literature.

House Behind The Cedars

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

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Books by Charles W. Chesnutt