Why do you read Chesnutt today? Mail us your reasons and we will post a selection of reader responses here.

Dean McWilliams, Ohio University:

      Eric J. Sundquist's To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature is one of the most significant recent studies of American literature. Sundquist justifies devoting nearly one third of his important study to Chesnutt with the assertion that Chesnutt was "among the major American fiction writers of the nineteenth century." I would do nothing to challenge Sundquist's claim, but I would like to amend it by resituating it historically. Chesnutt's two volumes of short stories appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century, in 1899, but the three novels published in his lifetime came out in the twentieth century, in 1900, 1901 and 1905. In addition, Chesnutt completed two novels in the 1920s, and they are now in print. The way we read an author is influenced by the way we situate him or her historically. It is important to note that Chesnutt's life and career spanned two very different centuries.

      Chesnutt was a liminal figure who straddled and confounded several important American categories. Indistinguishable in appearance from most European Americans, he proudly asserted his identity as a Negro. A forty-year resident of Cleveland, he wrote obsessively of the American South, where he spent his youth. Equally interesting and often overlooked is the way Chesnutt's career spans a series of distinct historical moments. Born when blacks were still held as property, he was educated during the brief glow of Reconstruction, and then spent the remainder of his life under the shadow of segregation. Chesnutt witnessed the flowering of black creativity in the 1920s, and his last novel, had it been published at the time of its composition, would have appeared in the same year, 1928, as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Nella Larson's Quicksand. Born and shaped in the nineteenth century, Chesnutt spent the majority of his creative life in the twentieth.

      Of course, more is involved than calendar dates when we try to place a writer in the appropriate historical context. Young Chesnutt was inspired by the idealism of his teachers at the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he studied, and at a later moment, by the reformers of the Progressive Movement. But as a student of history and of the law, he was angered by America's refusal to live up to its own founding principles. He worked to claim for Americans of African descent their full human and civil rights. However, Chesnutt recognized, better than most writers of his time, the linguistic and literary obstacles which frustrated these claims. A lawyer and a student of languages, he saw the way America's racial thinking was grounded on fictions so universally accepted as to seem part of nature himself. Chesnutt's understanding of what we now call the social construction of race and the way these constructions are supported by the structures of language make him a strikingly contemporary writer.