Ambitious for national recognition and the financial independence that he believed would accompany literary success, Chesnutt tried his best to find a literary formula that would make him a best-selling popular writer who, nevertheless, would be taken seriously as a thoughtful commentator on social problems. He failed to win an enduring audience for his work in his own time. However, he succeeded in laying the groundwork for twentieth-century literary treatments of the American color line in techniques and metaphors that have still not lost their suggestiveness or validity.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, two years before the beginning of the Civil War. His parents, Andrew Jackson and Anne Maria Sampson Chesnutt, were members of antebellum North Carolina's free Negro class, a predominantly middle-class group that included racially mixed individuals. In 1856 Chesnutt's parents had emigrated from their homes in Fayetteville seeking refuge from increasingly oppressive laws against free blacks. They met on a wagon train going north and married in Cleveland in 1857. Charles's father worked as a horse-car conductor until the Civil War, when he enlisted in the Union Army as a teamster.
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