The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man’s dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century.
Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt’s everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt’s journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.
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Primarily of interest to scholars, this text comprises the bulk of the journals of Chesnutt, a black writer from North Carolina, from 1874 to 1882. It records some early attempts at prose and poetry and the moment at which he resolves to preserve his ``impressions of men and things . . . with a view to future use in literary work.'' His love for languages (he learned French, German and Latin) and faith in education as the key to success estrange him from blacks who do not share such views, but cannot secure him unqualified acceptance from whites. Chesnutt says he has no white friends (``any man who feels himself too good to sit at table with me'' is no friend) and is stung by the prejudice that can frustrate his ambitions (``first class teachers would not teach a `nigger' and I would have no other sort''). Not surprisingly, some entries reveal wrenching loneliness, yet others overflow with exuberance: ``I am getting along finely with the girls . . . Joe loves me, Emma loves me . . . Jane loves me.'' In all, it gives us an intriguing glimpse of a talented, intelligent person who strives to embody that American ideal, the self-made man, only to be told that the model was never intended for him. Illustrations not seen by PW. A volume of Chesnutt's stories, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (edited and with a foreword by Richard H. Brodhead; ; cloth *-1378-2 ) will also be published by Duke in December; this edition reassembles all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre.
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