To Be an Author (Princeton Legacy Library)

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 publishing industry of the turn of the century. Selected for inclusion are those letters chronicling the rise of Chesnutt, 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 black man during the period. In his insightful commentaries on his own situation, Chesnutt provides a special perspective on life in American during the Gilded Age, the "gay `90s" 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". The editors of this volume 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 the light of Chesnutt's biography and the less-than-promising prospects faced by a would-be literary artist of his racial background. Their annotations explain contempoary events to which Chesnutt responds.