Table of Contents

Introduction by Werner Sollors
Charles W. Chesnutt's Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Acknowledgments

The Text of The Marrow of Tradition

Contexts

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Frances Richardson Keller o [Chesnutt's Parents]

SELECTED LETTERS

To Walter Hines Page, Nov. 11, 1898
To Walter Hines Page, Mar. 22, 1899
To Booker T. Washington, Oct. 8, 1901
To Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Oct. 26, 1901
From Booker T. Washington, Oct. 28, 1901
To Booker T. Washington, Nov. 16, 1901
To Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Dec. 30, 1901
To William Monroe Trotter [Jan. 1902]
From W. E. B. Du Bois to Houghton Mifflin, Mar. 8, 1902
To Mrs. W. B. Henderson, Nov. 11, 1905

LITERARY MEMORANDA

Charles W. Chesnutt o [Plot Notes]
Sample Pages from Chesnutt's Hand-Corrected Proof Sheets of The Marrow of Tradition

ESSAYS

From The Courts and the Negro
From What Is a White Man?
The White and the Black
The Disfranchisement of the Negro

THE 1898 WILMINGTON RIOT

Rebecca Latimer Felton, Alexander L. Manly, and the Daily Record Editorial
John E. Talmadge o [Biographical Sketch of Mrs. Felton]
Rebecca Latimer Felton o Mrs. Felton Speaks
Biographical Sketch of Alex Manly
Alex Manly o Editorial
From Cause of Carolina Riots
The North Carolina Race Conflict
From Takes Mrs. Felton to Task for Speech
Mrs. W. H. Felton's Reply to Dr. Hawthorne's Attack
Nov. 10, 1898: A Day of Blood
North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources o Wilmington Race Riot Draft Report
1898 Wilmington Riot Commission o Findings
Hell Jolted Loose
White Declaration of Independence Negro Rule Ended, Washington Post (Nov. 11, 1898)
The Riot at Wilmington, Washington Post (Nov. 22, 1898)
A Forgotten Issue, Boston Globe (Nov. 20, 1898)
Is It Negro Rule? Independent (Nov. 24, 1898)
The South and Negro Suffrage, New-York Tribune (Nov. 25, 1898)
Portrait of Alfred Moore Waddell
Alfred Moore Waddell o The Story of the Wilmington, N.C., Race Riot, Collier's Weekly (Nov. 26, 1898)
Black Side of the Race Issue, Washington Post (Dec. 4, 1898)
The Wilmington Riot, Cleveland Gazette (Dec. 10, 1898)
Letter by a Negro Woman to President William McKinley (Nov. 13, 1898)
African Americans Killed or Wounded
Men Banished from Wilmington during and after the November 10 Violence
The Wilmington Riot, Chesnutt's Relatives, and African American Fiction
Sylvia Lyons Render o [Violence]
Richard Yarborough o Violence, Manhood, and Black Heroism

THE CAKEWALK

Sheet Music from the 1890s
Dusky Dinah: Cake-Walk and Patrol
Sambo at the Cake Walk
Remus Takes the Cake
Way Down South: Characteristic March, Cake-Walk and Two-Step
Cakewalk in the Contemporary Press
A Negro Festival, New-York Tribune (July 20, 1870)
A Cake Walk, San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 6, 1873)
H. S. Keller o The Cake Walk," Puck (Sept. 7, 1887)
They Walked for a Cake and Glory, Chicago Daily Tribune (Feb. 18, 1892)
The Cake Walk, New York Times (Feb. 18, 1892)
Took the Cake, Boston Globe (Aug. 23, 1892)

CRITICISM

SELECTED CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS AND EARLY ASSESSMENTS

The Race Question in Fiction, The Sunday Herald [Boston] (Oct. 27, 1901)
Hamilton Wright Mabie o The New Books, The Outlook (Nov. 16, 1901)
Our Holiday Book Table, Zion's Herald (Dec. 4, 1901)
Mr. Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, New York Times (Dec. 7, 1901)
A New Uncle Tom's Cabin, St. Paul Dispatch (Dec. 14, 1901)
Katherine Glover o News in the World of Books, Atlanta Journal (Dec. 14, 1901)
Charles Alexander o Our Journalist and Literary Folks, The Freeman [Indianapolis] (Dec. 28, 1901)
Mr. Chesnutt and the Negro Problem, Newark Sunday News. (Dec. 29, 1901)
A. E. H. o Fiction, The Chautauquan (Dec. 1901)
William Dean Howells o From A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction, North American Review (Dec. 1901)
T. Thomas Fortune o Note and Comment, The New York Age (July 20, 1905)
Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee o [Racial Conflict in Fiction]

RECEPTION

Sylvia Lyons Render o From Charles W. Chesnutt
William L. Andrews o From The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt

CHARACTERS

John Edgar Wideman o Charles W. Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition
P. Jay Delmar o Character and Structure in The Marrow of Tradition
Ernestine Williams Pickens o White Supremacy and Southern Reform Samina Najmi o From Janet, Polly, and Olivia: Constructs of Blackness and White Femininity in The Marrow of Tradition

JUNGIAN AND FOUCAULDIAN APPROACHES

Marjorie George and Richard S. Pressman o From Confronting the Shadow: Psycho-Political Repression in The Marrow of Tradition
Ryan Jay Friedman o From "Between Absorption and Extinction": Charles Chesnutt and Biopolitical Racism

PLESSY V. FERGUSON AND THE MARROW OF TRADITION

U.S. Supreme Court o Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896)
Brook Thomas o The Legal Argument of Charles W. Chesnutt's Novels

THE MARROW OF TRADITION AND HISTORY

Joyce Pettis o The Literary Imagination and the Historic Event: Chesnutt's Use of History in The Marrow of Tradition
Jae H. Roe o From Keeping an "Old Wound" Alive: The Marrow of Tradition and the Legacy of Wilmington
Eric Sundquist o From Charles Chesnutt's Cakewalk

REALISM, TRAGIC MULATTO, VIOLENCE

Ryan Simmons o From Simple and Complex Discourse in The Marrow of Tradition
Stephen P. Knadler o From Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness
Bryan Wagner o Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial Violence
Charles W. Chesnutt: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography

About the Author

Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the Civil War, his parents returned to their native Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Charles attended a school run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. After serving as principal of the State Colored Normal School from 1880 to 1883, he abandoned both his teaching career and a South that was increasingly hostile to African Americans. Moving back to Cleveland, he practiced law, established a successful legal stenography firm, and began pursuing a career as a writer. His first story, “Uncle Peter’s House,” about a newly emancipated Black family whose home is burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in 1885. It introduced the themes of folk life, racial injustice, and social reform that he would explore in dozens of short stories, essays, and three novels. By the time he died in 1932, Chesnutt was widely recognized as the dean of African American fiction writers. Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and African American Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Columbia University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Università degli Studi di Venezia. He is the author of Ethnic Modernism, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, and Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” His edited works include A New Literary History of America (with Greil Marcus), African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (with Glenda R. Carpio), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (with Marc Shell), Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America, The Return of Thematic Criticism, Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, The Invention of Ethnicity, and the Norton Critical edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself.