Chesnutt's fiction chronicles the small Southern town of the late nineteenth century. He was born in Cleveland to Andrew J. and Maria Sampson Chesnutt, free Negroes who had moved from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the North before the Civil War, but in 1866, the family returned to Fayetteville, and Chesnutt's father started a grocery store there. Young Charles heard folktales and other country lore in his father's market, but he preferred Latin authors and the English and American classics. At first his reading made him a snob. He said of the country people around him that they were "the most bigoted, superstitious, hardest-headed people in the world," believing in "ghosts, luck, horseshoes, cloud signs, witches and all other kinds of nonsense." Later, however, his reading, especially of Latin authors such as Ovid, would give him another perspective on these "uneducated" black people. Their myths would appear to him to be universal; their suffering and humor, part of their humanity.
When he was fourteen, he was given a position of pupil-teacher at the normal school for Negroes in Fayetteville, but his father's poverty soon made him seek elsewhere for other work. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, he taught briefly in Spartanburg.
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