William Dean Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt: Criticism and Race Fiction in the Age of Booker T. Washington

Abstract

tors, and publishers on the growth and development of AfroAmerican literature in general and individual Afro-American writers in particular constitutes a formidable and as yet unfinished task for the student of American literature and culture. Twentieth-century black writers have commented on the problematic relationships between the white literary establishment (if there is one) and the contemporary black writer trying to get a hearing.1 And such important works of literary history as Nathan I. Huggins's Harlem Renaissance2 have done much to reveal the nature of the relationship between white literary patrons and promoters like Carl Van Vechten and those black writers of the 1920'S whose initial recognition as creative talents stemmed often from the proselytizing of their patrons. However, studies of such literary relationships before the New Negro Renaissance have suffered from a rather one-sided view of the issue. Often the friendship between William Dean Howells and Paul Laurence Dunbar is treated as if it were the most instructive example of white critical influence over black art in the pre-Renaissance decades. However, a thoroughgoing examination of the relationship between Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt, the most prominent and accomplished Afro-American writer of fiction before the Harlem Renaissance, can prove equally instructive, while also casting greater light on the careers and opinions of these two deans of American and Afro-American literature at the turn of the century. Charles W. Chesnutt drew his literary friends and advisers from among the most successful and respected writers and critics of his