{"id":14317,"date":"2011-06-20T21:51:25","date_gmt":"2011-06-20T21:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=14317"},"modified":"2011-06-20T21:53:15","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T21:53:15","slug":"the-writers-almanac-podcast-with-garrison-keillor-charles-wadell-chesnutt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=14317","title":{"rendered":"The Writer’s Almanac Podcast with Garrison Keillor [Charles Wadell Chesnutt]"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Writer’s Almanac Podcast with Garrison Keillor [Charles Wadell Chesnutt]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Writer’s Almanac<\/a>
\n2011-06-20<\/p>\n

Garrison Keillor<\/a><\/strong>, Host<\/p>\n

Today in history and a poem or two.<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s the birthday of Charles Waddell Chesnutt<\/a> (books by this author), born on this day in Cleveland<\/a> (1858). His parents were free mixed-race Southerners who left Fayetteville, North Carolina<\/a>, for Ohio<\/a>. One of his grandfathers had been a slaveholder, and Chesnutt looked white, but he always identified as black. His family moved back to Fayetteville when Charles was eight, and the boy went to a Freedmen’s Bureau<\/a> school for the children of freed slaves. He became a teacher, and then principal of the State Colored Normal School<\/a> in Fayetteville, which trained black teachers.<\/p>\n

In 1880, when he was 22 years old, he wrote in his journal: “I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been a cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task.”
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\nIt took Chesnutt a few years to get there. He was an established and respected citizen in Fayetteville, but in 1883 he decided that he didn’t have much of a future as a black writer in the hostile post-Civil War<\/a> South. So he moved back to Cleveland with his wife and children. He passed the state bar exams and set up a stenography business, and in his spare time he wrote stories. In 1887, he published his first short story, “The Goophered Grapevine<\/a>,” in The Atlantic Monthly<\/a><\/em>. He was the first black fiction writer to be published in The Atlantic<\/em>\u2014although the magazine assumed that he was white until he informed them several years, and many stories, later…<\/p>\n