Born: June 20, 1858, Cleveland, OH

Education: Freedmen's School, Fayetteville, NC

Died: November 15, 1932, Cleveland, OH

Best known for short stories, novels, and essays on issues of race, color, and social identity in the post–Civil War South, Chesnutt was the first black author to succeed in mainstream American letters. He was born in Ohio to mixed-race free blacks from Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he grew up and taught school before migrating to Cleveland in 1883. There he became a lawyer, court stenographer, an acclaimed writer, and civil rights activist.

Chesnutt's fiction, which combined historical events and his lived experiences, depicts African American folk culture and realities of the color line. In The Conjure Woman (1899) ex-slave Uncle Julius narrates hoodoo tales showing the humanity and self-help of slaves. Chesnutt thus reveals that they were deserving of citizenship and equal opportunity. The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Colonel's Dream (1905) incisively reveal the class and racial dilemmas of elite mulattoes. Pulled between competing identities, many passed as whites. One response to master–slave miscegenation, passing subverted customs and laws against interracial marriage. A story of the bloody Wilmington, North Carolina race riot of 1898, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) powerfully unveils the riot's atrocities as well as black–white interdependence behind its scenes.