The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt - Charles Waddell Chesnutt

With no formal training in literature, Charles Waddell Chesnutt became the first black American writer to receive major critical attention from literary critics. Writing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he is most noted for his portrayal of life among the inhabitants of the Cape Fear River area of North Carolina, and was among the first writers to create characters, black or white, that did not fit any previous stereotypic pattern.