SOURCE: Price, Kenneth M. “Charles Chesnutt, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Intersection of African-American Fiction and Elite Culture.” In Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, pp. 257-74. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

In the following essay, Price examines the attitude of The Atlantic Monthly to African Americans in the nineteenth century and traces the periodical's relationship with the prominent African American author, Charles Chesnutt.

In March 1899 Charles Chesnutt wrote to one of his editors at Houghton, Mifflin Company, pinpointing the kind of work he was writing against: “I have been reading the March Atlantic. … The dialect story [“Chief”] is one of the sort of Southern stories that make me feel it my duty to write a different sort, and yet I did not lay it down without a tear of genuine emotion.”¹ These remarks clarify the importance of context for...