To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905 - Rilegato

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell

9780691036687: To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691036683 ISBN 13: 9780691036687

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1997

Long eclipsed by the writers who later rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) has received a steadily increasing amount of attention since the 1960s. In what he termed the "Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem" phase of African-American cultural history, this pioneer in the world of black letters vied with Paul Laurence Dunbar for the honor of being the first to "evince innate distinction in literature." The major establishment critic of his day, William Dean Howells, recognized Dunbar's poetry thus in 1896. But it was Chesnutt who won Howells's praise for prose fiction a few years later when The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth (1899) appeared. His other books, Frederick Douglass (1899), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel's Dream (1905), have since secured his permanent place in the history of American belles lettres.
Selected for inclusion in this first edition of Chesnutt's letters are those that best document the vibrant personality of a very successful Cleveland businessman who gave his free hours to the literary avocation that he had hoped would someday become his full-time career. Motivated as well by a desire to continue the noble work that the Abolitionists and Reconstruction Era reformers had begun, Chesnutt pursued the goal that he had announced in his journal years earlier in Fayetteville, N.C., before he emigrated to the North in 1883: he would not only demonstrate what African Americans were capable of intellectually but would, through his art, "elevate the whites" above ignoble prejudice against those of his racial background. By 1905 he had both succeeded and failed. To his mind he had reached the goal of transcending the earlier achievements of reform-novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion W. Tourgee. But such fame as Booker T. Washington's at the turn of the century eluded him. By late 1905, it was clear that his 1880s' dream of professional authorship was not to be realized in full. Chronicled here is the rise and fall of Charles W. Chesnutt as a man of letters.

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Recensione:

"A thoughtful and energetic reader, Mizruchi produces some fine insights, particularly about the novels' production of complicity between their narrators and seemingly non-authorial characters and their thematization of narrative technique as a mode of power."--Nineteenth-Century Literature

Contenuti:

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Editorial Note
	Introduction	3
Pt. I	Cable's Protege in 1889-1891: An "Insider" Views the Negro Question	27
Pt. II	A Dream Deferred, 1891-1896: The Businessman Prevails	73
Pt. III	Page's Protege in 1897-1899: The Reemergence of the Artist and Prophet	95
Pt. IV	The Professional Novelist of 1899-1902: Pursuit of the Dream	131
Pt. V	Discontent in 1903-1904: A Turn to Argumentative Prose	177
Pt. VI	The Quest Renewed, 1904-1905: Argumentative Art for an Indifferent Readership	211
	Index	237