Charles W. Chesnutt was an African American author during the postbellum era. Some of his most studied work was fictional tales called The Wife of His Youth and The Conjure Woman. Chesnutt was known as a novelist but would say he was an entrepreneur. Not only being a novelist, he was a school Principal, he was a practicing attorney, while practicing law, he became a success businessman with a legal stenography company.
His works was praised by his readers, but he was not a best-selling author during his time. He was writing a generation too early due writing methods. Chesnutt molded his entire life after the kind of enlightenment philosophies, “Gilded Age entrepreneurialism, individualist self-determination, rigorous self-improvement” which he felt could extend to the masses and abolish the beliefs of black folk culture.[1]
Chesnutt is quoted of saying “It is not altogether the money. It is a mixture of motives. I want fame; I want money; I want to raise my children in a different rank of life from that I sprang from”.[2] Chesnutt’s belief that authorship is a vocation that, far from transcending economics, is chosen in large measure because it can serve as a unique means by which to secure both fame and fortune.
[1] Taylor, Matthew A. “HOODOO YOU THINK YOU ARE?: Self-Conjuration in Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman.” In Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature, 113-38. (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 114
[2] Hewitt, Elizabeth. “CHARLES CHESNUTT’S CAPITALIST CONJURINGS.” Elh 76, no. 4 (931-962, Winter, 2009), 933
Biography
Hewitt, Elizabeth. “CHARLES CHESNUTT’S CAPITALIST CONJURINGS.” Elh 76, no. 4 (Winter, 2009): 931-962, http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/222981126?accountid=12085.
Sarnowski, Joe. “Self-preservation’: Identity, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Wife of His Youth.” Papers on Language & Literature 54, no. 4 (2018): 315+. Gale General OneFile (accessed April 1, 2020). https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/apps/doc/A566401076/ITOF?u=vic_liberty&sid=ITOF&xid=e63f109c.
Taylor, Matthew A. “HOODOO YOU THINK YOU ARE?: Self-Conjuration in Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman.” In Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature, 113-38. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Accessed April 1, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt5vkbw6.8.
Wood, Mary E. ““A State of Mind Akin to Madness”: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Short Fiction and the New Psychiatry.” American Literary Realism 44, no. 3 (2012): 189-208. Accessed April 2, 2020. doi:10.5406/amerlitereal.44.3.0189.
Mostly History 