The Marrow of Tradition

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 Freedmens 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 Peters 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 Universit 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.

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]