Charles W. Chesnutt

Charles Chesnutt was an essayist, an activist, and a lawyer, best known for his novel The House Behind the Cedars. Chestnutt’s work, which included essays and short stories, focused on racial identity in the South before and after the Civil War. He was one of the first African American authors to be published nationally, and one of his earliest short stories, “The Goophered Grapevine,” appeared in The Atlantic in 1887.