Charles Waddell Chesnutt was America's first important black writer of fiction; no black American before him had created a sustained body of significant work. Since his life spanned nearly two halves of two different centuries, his writing reflects both the new and the old. Despite the often clumsy and artificial plot devices in his novels, his portrayal of black character is both varied and realistic. No one until Chesnutt had invested the Negro common man (such as Josh Green in The Marrow of Tradition, 1901, and Uncle Julias in The Conjure Woman, 1899) with a dignity which does not strain the bounds of credulity. Yet although Chesnutt knew the seamy side of black life, he remained very much a child of the century of his birth. Genteel in his social habits and aspirations and fastidious in his taste for moral literature, he disapproved of many of the Harlem Renaissance writers...