N I N E S
Society for Textual Scholarship
The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image. Charles Chesnutt
The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive seeks to make Chesnutt's writings conveniently accessible to all. Writing in the years after Reconstruction as white supremacy took new virulent forms, Chesnutt addressed topics of vital concern, then and now, including race, identity, violence, class, and the familial and economic relations that zigzag across America’s color line. During his lifetime he published six major book-length works (two collections of short stories, three novels, and a biography of Frederick Douglas
After his death, Black scholars and writers, including Carter G. Woodson, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Lorraine Hansberry, championed Chesnutt, and in 1954 Arna Bontemps, then head of libraries at Fisk University, worked with Chesnutt's daughter, Helen Chesnutt, to bring the majority of his papers to Fisk, including manuscripts for six unpublished novels and fifteen stories. Since the 1980s Chesnutt's works have been at the center of groundbreaking scholarship, and continue to reshape the landscape of l
N I N E S
Society for Textual Scholarship