After the Civil War, Before the Harlem Renaissance
More significant works by African American novelists appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. After a long career as a poet, essayist, and lecturer, sixty-seven-year-old Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (c. 1825–c. 1911) wrote Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), a work motivated by the author's deep desire to help her fellow blacks. The novel follows the adventures of the title character before, during, and after the Civil War. The biracial daughter of a plantation owner, Iola Leroy is initially sold into slavery; after the war, she opens a school for freed blacks and eventually moves to the North with her reunited family members.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt's (1858–1932) Conjure Woman (1899) is a critically acclaimed collection of short stories set on a North Carolina plantation just after the Civil War.
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