The Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt: The Complete Short Stories

A master of the short story, Charles W. Chesnutt came of age during Reconstruction, witnessed racism codified by law, participated in the strengthening of Black communities, and sustained friendships with W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Kelly Miller, and others. But he stands apart from these luminaries as one of the first in a long line of African American writers, thinkers, and leaders to claim fiction as his chief means of expression. His fiction is taught around the world, and for the last forty years, it has been the subject of scholarship that has changed the landscape of US literary studies. But to date there has been neither a complete nor a scholarly edition of his short fiction. The Complete Short Stories is the inaugural volume in the series The Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt. It includes major bibliographic discoveries, sheds new light on his writing and revision process, documents the reach and range of his published stories, and includes all unpublished stories. Explanatory notes and story overviews draw from journals and letters, as well as his reading, travels, friendships, advocacy, and community ties. The volume also offers composition, publication and reception histories, as well as collations of all authoritative sources, including galleys corrected in Chesnutt's hand as he made hundreds of revisions. Arranged chronologically, the volume reveals that over more than fifty years, Chesnutt probed in his short fiction the subtle ethical issues surrounding who speaks, who listens, and whose story is told. Often witty and ironic, and always incisive, Chesnutt wrote humorous sketches with hidden barbs, and stories that dealt with post-Reconstruction violence and economic racism. He was a formidable craftsman and a subtle diagnostician of the nation's past and present. His stories ran in newspapers across the US and occasionally beyond, in the nation's leading humour magazine, in elite magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, and in the NAACP's The Crisis; and in 1899 he published two story collections with Houghton Mifflin. The Complete Short Stories offers for the first time a full account of a short story oeuvre unparalleled in US literary history.