What Do Charles W. Chesnutt and Thomas Wolfe Have to Tell Us about North Carolina (2008)

I think these people are great people and that they should be told about. (1) These people have never been treated from a closely sympathetic standpoint, they have not had their day in court. Their friends have written of them, and their enemies; but this is, so far as I know, the first instance where a writer with any of their own blood has attempted a literary portrayal of them. (2) Upon first glance, Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) and Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) seem to make strange bedfellows. Aside from the obvious fact that both writers were essentially natives of North Carolina and spent their formative years in the Old North State, there seems to be little that connects them. Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but accompanied his family on their move to Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1866 when the promises of Reconstruction convinced many industrious African Americans to return to the South. Wolfe was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, and later attended the University of North Carolina. Both men were very well educated, Chesnutt largely by his own design and instruction, and Wolfe under the tutelage of renowned scholars at Chapel Hill and Harvard. Also, both men fostered a desire to write very early in their lives and saw the vocation as a chance to chronicle their experiences in their state and respective hometowns. Interestingly, neither Chesnutt nor Wolfe began his writing career in earnest until he had left North Carolina, and, like Wolfe's protagonist Eugene Gant of the bildungsroman Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and the kunstlerroman Of Time and the River (1935), both men attempted to turn their eyes upon the distant soaring ranges by leaving the South for cities in the North (LHA 522). Chesnutt moved to New York in 1883 and later settled permanently with his young family in Cleveland. After his college graduation in 1920, Wolfe pursued a master's degree in playwriting at Harvard and later settled into a brief teaching stint at Washington Square College of New York University before forging his career as a novelist. In the North, both men found themselves far from the small towns and rural landscapes they had known as children. Chesnutt started a successful stenography business and joined social clubs that openly sought middle- to upper-class light-skinned African Americans. Wolfe eventually fell in love with a wealthy, successful Broadway stage designer who, although married and more than twenty years older than he, financially supported his creative exploits and later facilitated the dissemination of his manuscripts among agents, editors, and directors. Yet, regardless of their relative successes in the North, neither could escape the urge or compulsion to consider his southern roots, and their greatest literary and financial successes resulted from work set in fictionalized versions of their North Carolina hometowns. For Chesnutt, his collection of stories titled The Conjure Woman (1899), along with the support and editorial commentary of such luminaries as Albion Tourgee, George Washington Cable, Walter Hines Page, and William Dean Howells, made him a bona fide literary star and the first African American novelist to receive sustained critical and popular attention. In 1929 Wolfe, with the editorial guidance of the famous Maxwell Perkins, published Look Homeward, Angel, a novel set in the fictional town of Altamont in the state of Old Catawba. Unknown to many of their readers, these authors were portraying worlds they knew through first-hand experience. Chesnutt's father had owned a general store in Fayetteville during Chesnutt's youth, and his journal entries chronicle his earliest experiences hearing the stories and folktales that would later inform his fiction. The Conjure Woman, his first published book, is a frame-narrative composed of dialect tales that are laced with magic, violence, and local color. …