{"product_id":"9781931082068","title":"Charles W. Chesnutt Stories, Novels and Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eRejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and \"passing,\" \u003cb\u003eCharles W. Chesnutt\u003c\/b\u003e broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Conjure Woman\u003c\/b\u003e (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of \"conjure\" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published \u003cb\u003eThe Wife of His Youth\u003c\/b\u003e, and \u003cb\u003eOther Stories of the Color Line\u003c\/b\u003e, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, \u003cb\u003eThe House Behind the Cedars\u003c\/b\u003e (1900), is a study of racial passing. \u003cb\u003eThe Marrow of Tradition\u003c\/b\u003e (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNine uncollected short stories round out the volume's fiction, including conjure tales omitted from \u003cb\u003eThe Conjure Woman\u003c\/b\u003e and two stories that are unavailable in any other edition. Eight essays highlight his prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Library of America","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47052490211568,"sku":"9781931082068","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781931082068_p0.jpg?v=1763638430","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781931082068","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}