Library of America editor Werner Sollors discusses the life of Charles Chesnutt, conjure stories, and why we should read Chesnutt today.		Sollors speaks to Salon.com about Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law

Q: Who was Charles Chesnutt, and why is he so little known?

A: Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), the only major African-American fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance, was a remarkable realist, a lively, ironic raconteur whose work focused on the web of American race relations in the second half of the 19th century. Although he was compared by William Dean Howells to writers like Maupassant, Turgenev, and Henry James, and published his work in the Atlantic Monthly and with Houghton Mifflin, Chesnutt did not reach as broad an audience as he hoped for. While his early "conjure" stories, written partly in dialect and exploring African-American supernatural beliefs and practices during slavery times, had some popularity, his stories and novels exposing the hypocrisy and illogic of race laws were largely ignored by white readers. In a difficult period, the post-Reconstruction era often referred to as the "nadir" of black American history, Chesnutt established himself as an astoundingly subtle artist in both tragic and comic modes, and an often prophetic commentator on the dilemmas of race and identity.

Q: Why does Chesnutt belong in The Library of America? Why should we read him today?

Although in recent decades Chesnutt has become a widely studied author at universities, and the subject of a growing body of scholarly and critical work—at the most recent conference of the American Literature Association he received more attention than any other American author—his writing remains largely unknown to the wider reading public. The Library of America's edition will make clear that he was a uniquely prophetic voice who anticipated contemporary concerns with interracial family stories and questions of mixed-race identity. But apart from the timely political significance of his themes, Chesnutt is a powerfully vivid writer who draws the reader into a rich social universe. Chesnutt's world of southern towns and growing northern cities comes to life in descriptions of street cars and railway carriages, barbershops and exclusive clubs, plank roads and paths paved with oyster shells, country schools and churches vibrant with communal gatherings. Superstitions and magic beliefs coexist with the trappings of Victorian culture. Chesnutt's characters—the storyteller Uncle Julius and the trickster Grandison in The Conjure Woman, Rena Walden, the young woman caught between races in The House Behind the Cedars, the political antagonists of The Marrow of Tradition, with its collective portrait of a small town in violent transformation—have a zest and individuality that make his books far more than "thesis" novels. Chesnutt gives us a window into a lost world of American culture and lets us understand its continuing relevance to our own world.

Q: After a hundred years, haven't Chesnutt's explorations of race and racial identity become outmoded?

A: On the contrary: not only have the general themes of race and racial identity remained in the foreground as perhaps the most troubling domestic issues in the United States, but Chesnutt's approach to these themes—with its emphasis on racial mixing and on racial identity as legal fiction—is even more relevant than it was in the past.

Q: What is a conjure story?

The tales in The Conjure Woman and the other stories related to it all employ the same framing device. Each story is told by a white narrator, an ardent but somewhat shallow rationalist named John who was born (like Chesnutt) in Ohio and who (again like Chesnutt) has come to North Carolina in the wake of the Civil War. In each of the stories, John and his wife usually encounter the shrewd ex-slave Uncle Julius, who narrates the inner story, an occult tale of the old slavery times. The "conjure woman" of the title is Aunt Peggy, who performs magical transformations. The stories deliberately pit past against present, modern entrepreneurship against slavery, reason against superstition.

Q: Why did you include Chesnutt's nonfiction in the collection?

A: Chesnutt's extremely provocative and often prophetic essays challenge the intellectual underpinnings of racial segregation and disfranchisement. They demonstrate a modern sense of the legal construction of "whiteness," and examine the possibilities of an interracial American of the future. Today's readers may be surprised to discover how far ahead of their times are such essays as "What Is a White Man," "The Future American," and "The Courts and the Negro." In other essays Chesnutt reflects on the function of superstitions and folklore, and reviews the period of American literature in which he was most active.

Q: To what extent does Chesnutt's writing engage the historical situation of the post-Reconstruction South?

A: As a legally trained and widely read author, Chesnutt had an exceptionally clear understanding of the ways in which laws defined the color line at the turn of the century. He demonstrates the state-by-state variations of that definition, exposing just how pliable and deliberately constructed they were. Chesnutt is equally lucid in showing the disastrous consequences of those laws. He is unsurpassed in representing the lives of teachers and pupils in the Freedmen's Schools, and vividly dramatizes the terrible effects of the rise of the radical white supremacists who overturned the reform efforts of the Reconstruction era.