Bøger af Charles Chesnutt

In 1898 there occurred the only ever successful coup d'etat in the United States, when the white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina overthrew the local government there and established their rule. Outraged at the portrayal of the massacre and riots that would follow, Charles Chesnutt published The Marrow of Tradition in 1901 as a direct response to the misrepresentation of information at the time. Its significance lies not only in its moral courage, but in the realistic depictions of a multitude of varying points of view - all of which represent a person or a group who bore witness or were swept up in this tragic historical chapter.

This brief introduction to the life of Frederick Douglass opens with his birth in slavery and provides a short account of his escape to New York disguised as a sailor. After recounting Douglass's veritable act of self-naming, Chesnutt moves to Douglass's career as a lecturer on the antislavery circuit and his relationship with William Lloyd Garrison. In 1845, following the publication of his narrative, Douglass sailed to England, where he spent two years giving lectures on slavery and temperance throughout Great Britain. While in England, Mrs. Ellen Richardson secured funds for his legal manumission from Hugh Auld. When Frederick Douglass returned to the United States in April 1847, he was a free man with plans to establish and run his own antislavery newspaper. In December that same year, Douglass began printing and editing the North Star. The biography also describes Douglass's political activism and his work for African American civil liberties. In 1860, Douglass moved to Washington, D.C., where he was appointed to various committees (such as the Santo Domingo Commission in 1870) by Presidents Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, among others. Interestingly, Chesnutt only cursorily addresses some of the more controversial aspects of Douglass's life, including his public fallout with Garrison, his relationships with Julia Griffiths and John Brown, and his marriage to a white woman, Helen Pitts, in 1884. He overlooks entirely charges that Douglass distanced himself from his people or that his own affluence left him unsympathetic to his poorer brethren. Following descriptions of the many monuments and statues erected in Douglass's honor, Chesnutt closes with a Theodore Tilton poem that celebrates this "peer of princes, . . . the noblest Slave that ever God set free."

The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutt's finest novel, tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life. This edition revitalizes a much-neglected masterpiece by one of our most important African-American writers. As Werner Sollors writes, "William Dean Howells did not overstate his case when he compared Chesnutt's works with those by Turgenev, Maupassant, and James . . . and [Chesnutt] has become one of the most important 'crossover' authors from the African-American tradition.”