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Chesnutt, Charles Waddell
5 articles on Chesnutt, Charles Waddell
Chesnutt, Charles W.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 2347 Includes: Bibliography(b. 20 June 1858; d. 15 November 1932), writer. Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to free parents, Ann Maria Sampson Chesnutt and Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, who in 1856had fled the slave-holding South for better opportunities in the North. Chesnutt, the oldest of his father's eleven children from two marriages, became the first black author that the American literary establishment took seriously. Greatly influenced by his intellectual mother—a teacher who shortly after Chesnutt's birth moved her family from Cleveland to Oberlin, Ohio, because of the educational opportunities that Oberlin College might provide—and his abolitionist father, the blue-eyed and white-looking Chesnutt from the age of eight grew up black in Fayetteville, North Carolina (the Patesville of his fiction), where his family resettled at the end of the Civil War. ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 997 Includes: Bibliography1858–1932
Pioneering African American writer, known especially for short stories that realistically depict the full range of black experience. Charles W. Chesnutt was one of the first African American writers to become a mainstream success by writing fiction that realistically portrayed the complexities of African American life. Chesnutt was unusually honest about the problems inherent in that experience, and his stories remain valuable for their descriptions of nineteenth-century black culture and attitudes.Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were both mixed-race free blacks who had emigrated to Ohio but moved back south to Fayetteville, North Carolina, shortly after his birth. Chesnutt grew up during Reconstructionin relative privilege for an African American, and although he had a ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 3205 Includes: Further Reading(20 Jun. 1858–15 Nov. 1932), writer, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, a horse car driver, and Ann Maria Sampson. His parents were free African Americans who had left Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1856 to escape the oppressiveness of life in a slave state and its sparse opportunity. They were married in Cleveland in 1857. During the Civil War, Chesnutt's father served four years as a teamster in the Union army, but the family returned to Fayetteville in 1866 because A. J. Chesnutt'sfather, Waddell Cade (a local white farm owner—the name Chesnutt came from A. J.'s mother, Ann), helped his son establish a grocery store there. Young Charles helped in the store and over the years heard many things there about southern life and folkways that he recorded or remembered and that later became part of or ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 3871 Includes: A Story of the Color-Line | Literary Career | The Moral of the Story | Final Years: Political and Community Activism | Selected Works | Further ReadingAmerica's first great black novelist, Charles W. Chesnutt, was a mixed-race, middle-class political moderate. He spent much of his life, both as a child and an adult, in northern cities and southern towns, particularly in Ohio and North Carolina. He was a product of the industrial Gilded Age and of agrarian Reconstruction, an author who fused tradition with new forms, realism with romance, ancient mythology with African-American folklore, and love stories with the law. “I am neither fish, flesh, nor fowl,” Chesnutt confessed in 1881, “neither ‘nigger,’ white, nor ‘buckrah.’ Too ‘stuck-up’ for the colored folks, and, of course, not recognized by the whites.” Chesnutt, who wrote during the period that in 1931he called “Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem,” falls in between most American group identities. That station simultaneously equipped him ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1326(1858–1932), short story writer and novelist. Charles W. Chesnutt was the most influential African American writer of fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1899 to 1905, during which time he published two collections of short stories and three novels, Chesnutt skillfully enlisted the white-controlled publishing industry in the service of his social message. More successfully than any of his predecessors in African American fiction, Chesnutt gained a hearing from a significant portion of the national reading audience that was both engaged and disturbed by his analyses and indictments of racism.Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, the son of free African American emigres from the South, Charles Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, during the turbulent Reconstruction era. By his late ...
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