Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Was Donald Glover really what he seemed--a handsome, dedicated, and clever African-American star of the Harlem Renaissance, whose looks made him the "quarry" of a variety of women? Or could the secrets of his birth change his destiny entirely? Focusing on the culture of Harlem in the 1920s, Charles Chesnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and aesthetic life of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters, The Quarry is peopled with so many figures of the time--including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey--that it constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American history. Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man whose adoptive black parents are determined that he become a leader of the black people. Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.

Although he was the first African-American writer of fiction to gain acceptance by America's white literary establishment, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) has been eclipsed in popularity by other writers who later rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. Recently, this pathbreaking American writer has been receiving an increasing amount of attention. Two of his novels, Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (completed in 1921) and The Quarry (completed in 1928), were considered too incendiary to be published during Chesnutt's lifetime. Their publication now provides us not only the opportunity to read these two books previously missing from Chesnutt's oeuvrebut also the chance to appreciate better the intellectual progress of this literary pioneer. Chesnutt was the author of many other works, including The Conjure Woman & Other Conjure Tales, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow Tradition, and Mandy Oxendine. Princeton University Press recently published To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905 (edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Hidden Treasure Found
This is one of the three novels that Chesnutt wrote late in his career that were rejected by the publishers. The publishers apparently found THE QUARRY too controversial and in deed it is.The basic story line has beendone before - the Puddin Head Wilson theme that John Twain wrote of where aman is raised as black but is indeed white.Chesnutt varies the theme andwhile telling the story of Donald Glover also tells the story of hypocricyin American life.For those who did not like Chesnutt's early stories thatrelied heavily on dialect and folk tales, I would urge them to try hislater works. I recently read THE COLONEL'S DREAM which is an excellentstudy of the New South.The Quarry is an excellent view of America in theearly part of the 20th Century and perhaps today. ... Read more

Book Description
Revered African-American writer whose brief career was distinguished by his use of dialect-based tales and post-Civil War urban dramas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Important in context, possibly, but not a very good book today
It's possible that I'm missing something, but I didn't find this book engaging or enjoyable. (I'm told that _The Marrow Of Tradition_, also by Chesnutt, is much better.) Chesnutt does do a good job of exaggerating and parodying the tropes of late 1800s sentimental fiction, but the contemporary reader is likely to find these a bit hackneyed. Few if any of the characters are sympathetic, the action seems forced, and the ending is disappointing both literally and thematically. That said, it's unclear that Chesnutt could have ended the book any other way, and there are some subtle details that push against the prevailing mores of the time. Watch especially the conversation between John and Judge Straight, and the comparative lack of retribution for John's life choices as compared to Rena's.

If you're interested in late 1800s stories of race passing by African-American authors that provide a heavy-handed moral, try Frances Harper or Pauline Hopkins (or the other Chesnutt mentioned above, though I haven't read it myself) --- if you want to see this exact same plot arc done so much better (and with the same moral!) in 1850, read Frank J. Webb's _The Garies And Their Friends._

There are plenty of scholarly reasons to read this book, but if you don't have one and are looking for entertainment or personal enlightenment, I'd point you away from this book and toward _The Garies_.

Worth reading for historical insight
If published today, I would have given this book 3 stars because of the amount of contrivance it contains. But considering that it was first published in 1900, it must be given higher esteem. Historically, the study it provides of being biracial (considered Black then) and able to pass as white in the Carolinas 100 years ago is invaluable to the African American literary canon. The dilemmas faced by this ability are brilliantly portrayed in this book. I was fascinated with the dilemmas whites and "dark-skinned" blacks faced socially when dealing with the Rena and her brother. I especially enjoyed the conversation between her brother John and the town lawyer when John asks him to teach him to become a lawyer - I thought that was the most brilliantly written passage in the book.

Despite the contrivances and that it takes a bit to get into the writer's style, this was a compelling read. Though not especially likeable, the characters are interesting, complex and well-drawn.

I recommend this to anyone interested in the racial history of the South after abolition.

Incredibly engaging
I had to read this book for a Senior Seminar in English and was surprised to find that it was an entertaining read. Granted, one must suspend disbelief in a few places in order to allow for coincidences but what Chesnutt does is something of a pastiche of different writing genres. He also goes to the very limits in portraying the many gradations that existed in the Southern color line.
In truth, most of the characters are not necessarily likeable, but one cannot help turning the pages to see who will do what next. Those who chanced to pass for white were never far from an intrigue of some kind.
This is a fast read as well as an entertaining one, and while Chesnutt plays with many different styles and humors, it is not without historical merit.

Important writer, but never quite reaches mastery
I am writing a final paper on this book at the moment.Chestnutt is an important writer, but not one of the best of the period.I don't think he ever got the chance to fully mature as a writer.This book leaves me witha lot of what-ifs and whys.For example, he introduces a nephew to theheroine who appears as though he will be important, but simply drops out ofthe picture. The book leaves me wondering what he meant to do, and didn'thave time for. It is a good read, but rather frustrating.

If you onlyhave time to read one African American classic, I would turn you instead toZora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Are Watching God" which is trulyamazing! ... Read more

Book Description
Rejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life.

The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), is a study of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era.

Nine uncollected short stories round out the volume's fiction, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman and two stories that are unavailable in any other edition. Eight essays highlight his prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Charles Chestnutt Review
Wow! If you want a glimpse of American life for African Americans shortly after the civil war this book provides wonderful insights.Charles Chestnutt writes stories of what it was like to be free after a life of slavery...The stories are about African Americans adjustment to freedom and life in the late 19th century.
The stories are beautifully written and provide a rare glimpse of this era from the African American point of view. Too bad this author is not well known....Reminds me of Mark Twain in many ways. Thank you Library of America for keeping authors who are no longer commercially available alive.
Charles Chestnutt is now in my top 5 American authors....Read it and enjoy!
The book is beautifully bound and has a built in ribbon bookmark..fun to read. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Charles Waddell Chesnutt declared his intentions in this 1891 entry in journal: "Every time I read a good novel, I want to write one. It is the dream of my life- -to be an author." Less than a decade later, he had realized his dream. It was, however, short-lived; Chesnutt published his last novel in 1905, and only a few stories thereafter.Still, as one of the first blacks to earn his living as a writer before the Harlem Renaissance, he remains an important figure in American literature. This collection of letters, including correspondence with Booker T. Washington and the Southern novelist George Washington Cable (an early mentor), is essential for anyone curious about the roots of black writing.Book Description
"This book will appeal to a growing audience, not just of Chesnutt scholars but of all those interested in the interracial history of American letters and the development of the African-American literary field." George Hutchinson, author of The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White Collected in this volume are the 1889-1905 letters of one of the first African-American literary artists to cross the "color line" into the de facto segregated American publishing industry of the turn of the century. Selected for inclusion are those chronicling the rise of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), an attorney and businessman in Cleveland, Ohio, who achieved prominence as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and lecturer despite the obstacles faced by a man of color during the "Jim Crow" period. In his insightful commentaries on his own situation, Chesnutt provides as well a special perspective on life-at- large in America during the Gilded Age, the "gay `90s" (which were not so gay for African Americans), and the Progressive era. Like his black correspondents Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, T. Thomas Fortune, and William M. Trotter he was one of the major commentators on what was then termed the "Negro Problem." His most distinguished novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), were published by major "white" presses of the time; not only did his editors and publishers but then- preeminent black and white critics greet these literary protests against racism as proof of the intellectual and artistic excellence of which a long-oppressed people were capable when afforded equal opportunity. Since the 1960s, when the rediscovery of his genius began in earnest, Chesnutt has received even more recognition than he enjoyed by the early 1900s. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III, have surveyed every collection of Chesnutt's papers and those of his correspondents in order to reconstruct the story of his most vital years as an author. Their introduction contextualizes the letters in light of Chesnutt biography and the less-than-promising prospects faced by a would-be literary artist of his racial background. Their encyclopedic annotations explaining contemporary events to which Chesnutt responds and what was then transpiring in both black and white cultural environments illuminate not only Chesnutt's character but those of many now unfamiliar figures who also contributed to what Chesnutt termed the "cause." Provided in this first- ever edition of Chesnutt's letters is a detailed portrait of one of the pioneers in the African-American literary tradition and a panorama of American life a century ago. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Analyzing an Enigma
Any serious student of African American literature has read the fiction and/or journals of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, one of the most ambitious, intelligent, and under-rated writers of his time."The AbsentMan" is a must-read for Chesnutt scholars, because in it, Duncanexplores some of the reasons for Chesnutt's enigmatic reputation:hiselusive authorial stance; his introspective personality; his lifelongpreoccupation with the ways in which society constructs a person'sidentity; and his persistent examinations of racial attitudes at a timewhen much of the reading public was unprepared both emotionally andintellectually for such honesty.Duncan painstakingly dissects the variousnarrative constructs--such as masking, and the first-personnarrator-protagonist vs. the witness-narrator--with which Chesnuttexperimented in his writing.Duncan demonstrates an astute understandingof Chesnutt's delicate role:a 19th-century black writer attempting tochallenge the racial assumptions of his readers, most of whom were white,and gain fame and fortune in the process.Ambitious indeed, and, sadly,Chesnutt in the end suffered from critical backlash. After Chesnutt's deathin 1932, his canon seemed neglected for a time; however, critical attentionincreased during the latter half of the 20th century, and, influenced byChesnutt scholar Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Duncan's voice is a competentaddition.While some critics have focused mainly on Chesnutt's mostwell-known works, such as "The Conjure Woman" and "TheMarrow of Tradition," Duncan gives special attention to Chesnutt'slesser known short fiction, such as the short stories "Baxter'sProcrustes" and "The Shadow of My Past."Duncan's is amuch-needed contribution to our understanding and appreciation ofChesnutt's rhetorical brilliance. ... Read more

Book Description
Studies in Short Fiction Series Editors: Gary Scharnhorst, University of New MexicoEric Haralson, State University of New York at StonybrookThe coverage offered in Twaynes Studies in Short Fiction series extends beyond authors written works to discuss the writers personal life taken from interviews, essays, memoirs, and other biographical material; the critical reception to his or her work; and an overview of how the subjects output fits into the larger world of literature.Each volume is designed as a complete and self-contained companion to a particular writers short fiction, and will invigorate any reading of the writers works. Further enhancing its value as a reference work, each volume contains a chronology, selected bibliography, and an index, and library bindings with cloth covers insure maximum longevity. Charles W. Chesnutt's reputation as a master of the short story has only recently begun to recover the stature that was accorded him shortly after the publication of his collections The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (both in 1899).One of the most revered African-American writers of his day (he was also a novelist, essayist, and diarist), Chesnutt in his brief career distinguished himself primarily with his dialect-based tales and his post-Civil War urban dramas.In this historically rich analysis of Chesnutt's short fiction, Henry B. Wonham argues that the writer explored the causes and effects of the prevasive influences of "the color line" more subtly and creatively than any of his contemporaries, black or white.In discussing both the dialect and nondialect tales, Wonham concludes that Chesnutt's true genius for expressing the racial dynamics of the era he named "Post-BellumPre-Harlem" emerges most clearly in his short fiction.The volume includes Chesnutt's journal excerpts and several essays, plus essays by William Dean Howells and other,- more contemporary critics of the story form.Highly recommended for academic, public, and school libraries. CHOICETwaynes Studies in Short Fiction series offers concise, sensitive surveys of the works of important practitioners of the short story. BooklistTwayne Publishers has done it again.These handsome volumes should be considered not only for the college library, but also for students, teachers, and devotees of the short story. Studies in Short Fiction ... Read more

Book Description