SOURCE: Wonham, Henry B. “Part 1: The Short Fiction.” In Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 3-80. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

In the following essay, Wonham details Chesnutt's literary career and the author's dialect and non-dialect short stories.

Introduction

One of the many arresting ironies of Charles W. Chesnutt's brilliant but abbreviated literary career lies in the fact that the masterful short stories for which he will be remembered in anthologies and histories of American literature were intended as preparation. Chesnutt's grandiose literary ambitions always pointed in the direction of the novel, the one form through which he felt it might be possible to earn the financial rewards and the widespread notoriety he so earnestly desired. “I want fame; I want money,” he confided to his journal in 1881; “I want to raise my children in a different rank of life from that I sprang from...