Charles W. Chesnutt

Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in a Southern state of America. He had mixed white and black blood and, because of his very fair looks, could have pretended to be a white man but chose never to do so. After a rural education, he eventually went on to study law and became a lawyer. He opted to live in the North so that he could mix in literary circles. Chesnutt’s stories and novels were at first very popular, as he used dialect in his black characters’ speech like every other writer of his time, but his later works were increasingly complicated to show the difficult situation in the South. From the early years of the twentieth century, more radical writers thought Chesnutt was racist. He never made enough money to live from his writing, although critics always praised it. He was though a successful businessman and political activist. He died in 1932.