Table of Contents

The Portable Charles W. ChesnuttGeneral Introduction Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Introduction William L. Andrews
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Texts

The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt

I. Short Stories

The Goophered Grapevine
Po' Sandy
Mars Jeems's Nightmare
Sis' Becky's Pickaninny
The Wife of His Youth
The Sheriff's Children
A Matter of Principle
The Passing of Grandison
Uncle Wellington's Wives
The Web of Circumstance
Dave's Neckliss
Baxter's Procrustes

II. Novel

The Marrow of Tradition

III. Essays

What Is a White Man?
The Disfranchisement of the Negro
Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem

About the Author

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of To Tell a Free Story and editor or coeditor of more than thirty books on African American literature.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Africana Studies at Cornell University, and also tenured at Yale, Duke, and Harvard, where he was appointed W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities in 1991. Professor Gates is the author of Figures in Black- Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Wonders of the African World, The Signifying Monkey- A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Loose Cannons- Notes on the Culture Wars, and Colored People- A Memoir. With Cornel West, he co-wrote The African American Century- How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country and The Future of the Race. He is also the editor of the critically-acclaimed edition of Our Nig, an annotated reprint of Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 novel, The Slave's Narrative (with the late Charles T. Davis), Africana- The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Six Women's Slave Narratives, and In the House of Oshugbo- Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize.