In the following excerpt, Selke offers an extended analysis of the short story "The Sheriff's Children," which contains what he identifies as Chesnutt's characteristic literary themes.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt vies with Paul Laurence Dunbar in being the first Afro-American author to be accepted by major American publishing houses and to win national recognition and fame. Both authors, in order to be published at all, had to come to terms with the literary forms and conventions of the Plantation Tradition whose chief exponents were Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen and Harry Stillwell Edwards. This literary convention stipulated that the black characters be presented as living contentedly in an Edenic South, that they be quaint, childlike and docile, tellers of exotic yarns for the entertainment of massa's children or for massa himself. It is this tradition which gave rise to the literary stereotypes of the...