Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) was an American writer, lawyer, and civil rights activist, and is widely regarded as one of the most important African American authors of the late nineteenth century. Born in Ohio to free Black parents, he grew up in North Carolina during the Reconstruction era, an experience that would later shape much of his fiction. In the 1880s and 1890s he became one of the first Black writers to publish regularly in major American magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly. His best-known collections are The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), while his novels include The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream. His writing explored race, class, colorism, and the phenomenon of passing, often exposing the contradictions of American society in the decades following the abolition of slavery. Although his work received mixed attention during his lifetime, it was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now considered foundational to the development of African American literature.