A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt

In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin. Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry.

About the Author :
Tess Chakkalakal teaches African-American and American Literature at Bowdoin College. Her writing has appeared in The New England Quarterly, J19, American Literary History, and many others. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century American (Illinois UP, 2011) and co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition (West Virginia UP, 2022) She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

Review :
"Chakkalakal asks the reader to see the 'First Negro Novelist' as he saw himself: a writer and student of American letters at a time when the literary marketplace struggled to take him seriously...a timely reminder of the influence of artists like Charles W. Chesnutt today, when perhaps only literature has the power to sustain us." - The New York Times Book Review "Excellent ... An overdue celebration of an unjustly forgotten author, this enthralls." - Publisher's Weekly "Chesnutt rose from humble roots to become ... one of America's leading authors, a story dexterously illuminated by Chakkalakal with panache and insight ... Chakkalakal brilliantly charts Chesnutt's determination and literary success as she conjures an inspirational tale of genius finding its destiny." -Booklist "The first full-length biography of African American writer Charles Chesnutt, Tess Chakkalakal's A Matter of Complexion is an immersive account of the life and thought of one the post-Civil war era's most fascinating public intellectuals. If you've read Chesnutt, you'll want to read this book, and if you have not read Chesnutt. you'll want to, after reading this book." - Mia E. Bay, Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of Traveling Black "Charles W. Chesnutt was the most innovative and socially committed African American writer of fiction between Reconstruction and World War I. Tess Chakkalakal's outstanding biography provides the most complete and insightful portrait we have of this fascinating artist and prophetic public intellectual." - William L. Andrews, The University of North Carolina, Author of Slavery and Class in the American South "In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal celebrates a boundary-breaking writer who deserves to be far better known, and gives us a compelling history of America's cultural, business, and political life. An important contribution to our understanding of race, art, and citizenship." - Tracy Daugherty, author of Larry McMurtry: A Life