Über den Autor Chesnutt, Charles W.
Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the Civil War, his parents returned to their native Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Charles attended a school run by the Freedmen's Bureau. After serving as principal of the State Colored Normal School from 1880 to 1883, he abandoned both his teaching career and a South that was increasingly hostile to African Americans. Moving back to Cleveland, he practiced law, established a successful legal stenography firm, and began pursuing a career as a writer. His first story, "Uncle Peter's House," about a newly emancipated Black family whose home is burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in 1885. It introduced the themes of folk life, racial injustice, and social reform that he would explore in dozens of short stories, essays, and three novels. By the time he died in 1932, Chesnutt was widely recognized as the dean of African American fiction writers.Autumn Womack is an Assistant Professor in the departments of African American Studies and English at Princeton University, where she specializes in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literary culture. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (2022).