While most critics thought that the novel was well
written, many condemned its themes and subject
matter. The content was too inflammatory and the
portrait of southern violence and the dilemma of
miscegenation too provocative. Chesnutt’s well-
known and respected editor, William Dean How-
ells, called the novel “bitter.” The financial failure
of The Marrow of Tradition forced Chesnutt to re-
open his stenography business.
Although Chesnutt continued to write over
the next few years, he found little success. One
short story, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” was published in
1904 in the Atlantic Monthly. Another novel, The
Colonel’s Dream, appeared the same year. Neither
work made a substantial impact on Chesnutt’s ca-
reer; subsequently, he did not return to writing.
At his death in 1932, he left behind six unpub-
lished novels, including Mandy Oxendine, which
finally saw print in 1997. Chesnutt’s influence on
the development of African-American fiction, the
American short story, and the next generation of
writers, which would constitute the New Negro
movement and the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, cannot
be underestimated. He remained a critical voice
for American history and culture throughout his
lifetime. In 1915, he opposed the screening of D.
W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in Cleveland,
Ohio, where he was still a resident. Based on the
novel The Clansmen by Thomas Dixon, who was a
contemporary of Chesnutt’s, the film and the story
represented the violent and racist attitudes engen-
dered by southern history that Chesnutt had spent
his career trying to dismantle. Four years before
his death, he was awarded the NATIONAL ASSOCIA-
TION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE’s
Spingarn Medal celebrating his service to African-
American life, art, and culture.
Although Chesnutt never achieved the liter-
ary reputation that he desired in his lifetime, his
contribution to a deeper understanding of race
relations in America following the Civil War was
profound. He believed that it was his mission as
a writer to “educate” white America about the
culture and life of African Americans, both his-
torically and in his own era. His work critically
engaged the popular literature of the time in a
process of African-American “signifying.” The
Marrow of Tradition draws on character types
and themes found in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson,
and both The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His
Youth contain stories that directly refute the por-
trait of African-American life depicted by novelists
of the South. The work of plantation writers like
Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and
Dixon had a wide readership and provided the
American public with a picture of the South that
was often romantic. Their work especially illus-
trated a dangerous nostalgia or distortion of his-
tory. Chesnutt’s writing countered this vision with
sociopolitical realism and, sometimes, satirical
humor. Chesnutt belonged to the same group as
Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate
Chopin: American literary realists who were at one
time edited by Howells.
Howells’s penchant for dialect partially ex-
plains his fondness for Chesnutt’s work. The edi-
tor especially admired the stories of The Conjure
Woman and Chesnutt’s ability to reflect accu-
rately the African-American vernacular tradition.
The seven stories that constitute this collection
are presented in a frame narrative constructed
around the characters of Annie, John, and Uncle
Julius. John is a carpetbagger who has traveled to
the former McAdoo plantation with the intent
of purchasing the land and revitalizing its vine-
yards. He has been instructed to go South for the
climate in the hopes that it will help the health of
his wife, Annie. Uncle Julius is a former slave of
the plantation who still inhabits the space. At first
he appears as a counterpart to Harris’s infamous
Uncle Remus. He does begin to spin tall tales, or
folk narratives, in the manner of Uncle Remus.
But in John’s eyes, the goal of the storytelling is
financial reward. To a more critical reader, Julius’s
stories reveal a more nuanced tricksterism. Julius
does often receive some benefit from his tales;
he often tells them to forestall an event that will
impede his own objectives, as is the case in “The
Goophered Grapevine.” But these transformation
tales also allow Julius to revise the history of the
South that John and America think they know.
Symbolically, the slaves in the tales represent
the post-Reconstruction lives of African Ameri-
cans—held in economic slavery by the policiesChesnutt, Charles W. 99