Stories, Novels and Essays, Chestnutt C

The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of conjure tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutts native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), is a study of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutts masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era.

Nine uncollected short stories round out the volumes fiction, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman and two stories that are unavailable in any other edition. Eight essays highlight his prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself.