Chesnutt Biography from ncwriters.

org

Charles
Waddell
Chesnutt
was born in Chesnutt Biography at The North Carolina
Cleveland, Writers' Network
Ohio, on
June 20,
1858, the
son of two
free
African-
Americans
who had
moved
north from
Fayetteville,
North
Carolina,
two years
earlier.

Both of his grandmothers were of mixed-race, while it is probable that both of his grandfathers were white, a
complex genealogy later reflected in his fiction. In 1866 his family moved to Fayetteville, where his father
opened a grocery store. After attending a Freedmen's Bureau school in Fayetteville, Chesnutt taught at a school
for black children in Charlotte (1873 76) before becoming assistant principal and principal (1877 83) of the
State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville. In 1878, he married Susan Perry, a Fayetteville schoolteacher; they
would have four children together. During this period Chesnutt continued his self-education, studying French,
German, and rhetoric, and learning stenography.

Discouraged by the end of Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy in the South, Chesnutt
returned in 1883 to Cleveland, where he eventually established a successful stenographic business. He also
began publishing stories, sketches, and essays in newspapers and magazines, becoming the first African-
American fiction writer to appear in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1899 Chesnutt published two story collections,
The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, as well as a biography of
Frederick Douglass, and decided to become a full-time writer and lecturer. His novels The House Behind the
Cedars (1900), a tale of racial "passing," and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), inspired by the 1898 race riot in
Wilmington, N.C., sold poorly, and in 1901 Chesnutt resumed his stenography business. He published another
novel, The Colonel's Dream (1905), an attack on the convict-lease system, and continued to write and speak
against racial inequality. Chesnutt died in Cleveland on November 15, 1932.