A matter of complexion : the life and fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt / Tess Chakkalakal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chakkalakal, Tess, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chesnutt, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932.

Chesnutt, Charles W.

Novelists, American--19th century--Biography.

Novelists, American.

African American novelists--Biography.

African American novelists.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

viii, 369 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2025.

Summary:

"A biography of Charles Chesnutt, one of the first Black authors to write for both Black and white readers. In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered "mixed race." He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin. Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prologue: A friendship across the color line

Part I: Youth. Ancestry

The teacher

Reading alone

Leaving Fayetteville

Part II: Going North. Adventure in New York

A professional writer is born

Conjuring The Atlantic

The novelist as court reporter

Part III: New England. Stories of the color line

Takes up literature

Part IV: Home. Passing on Rena

Future Americans

Southbound

The novelist as public intellectual

Part V: Age of problems. Victims of heredity

Literary celebrity

Fathering a renaissance

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781250287632

1250287634

OCLC:

1429662414