S01E05 | Who Was Charles Chesnutt?

C19: America in the 19th Century

How do the recovered lives and work of Black writers find an audience? Over the last three decades, Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) has become central to nineteenth-century African American literary studies. Scholars have drawn attention to the subtlety, wit, and complexity of his stories, novels, and essays, which were once regarded as pandering and old-fashioned. Yet, despite the ongoing boom in Chesnutt scholarship, we still know relatively little about his life, and the general reading public rarely encounters his work. Tess Chakkalakal (Bowdoin College) hopes to change that with a new biography of Chesnutt aimed toward a general readership. In this episode, she sits down with C19 Podcast producer Mark Sussman (Hunter College, CUNY) to talk about some new discoveries about Chesnutt's life, the challenges of writing for a general audience, and why Chesnutt matters now.