Overview of Charles Wardell Chesnutt

1. Charles Wardell Chesnutt
1858-1932

2. Backgound
 Born in Cleveland, Ohio 20 June 1858 to free “persons of color”
 Grandfather was a slave owner
 Wrote about the complexities of mixed-race social status in the South
 When he was 8, parents moved back to Fayettevile, NC
 Began teaching in 1872
 1880, principal of the Fayetteville State Normal School for Negroes
 Returned to Cleveland 1883 and after passing state bar exam became a court
reporter

3. Themes and Writing Style
 Wrote so his work was not identified as African American
 Themes
 Myth of the “happy darky” on the plantation
 The mixed-blood person
 Interbreeding of different races natural progression, not shocking
 Wrote to counter stories by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Paul
Lawrence Dunbar, and Frederick Douglas

4. Influence
 Chesnutt “was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People for his pioneering literary work on behalf of the Afro-
American struggle. Today Chesnutt is recognized as a major innovator in the tradition of Afro
American fiction, an important contributor to the deromanticizing trend in post-Civil War
southern literature and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who treated the
color line in American life” (William L. Andrews, “Charles Wardell Chesnutt 1858-1932,”
Documenting the American South).