Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 10 November 1900
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169co
64 Brenton St.,
Cleveland, O.,
Nov. 10, 1900.
My dear Mr. Washington:
Your favor of Nov. 3d is at hand. I shall try to regulate my visit1 to Tuskegee2 so as to meet you there, as it would otherwise be like seeing the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. In one sense, at least, you are Tuskegee; as Page3 says in his new magazine4 "Every successful industrial or financial combination is built on a strong personality,"5—and so is
every other great enterprise, Tuskegee included.
I read the first of your Outlook6serial7 with great interest and pleasure, and look forward to reading them all with similar profit. I am pleased to know that you read "The Sway-backed House"8 & hope you may see my new novel,9 which is already winning golden opinions.10
Sincerely yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt.Correspondent: Booker T. Washington (1856–1913), one of the most well-known Black activists of the early 20th century, was born into slavery in Virginia. In 1881, he became the president of what would become the Tuskegee Institute, advocating widely as a speaker and writer for technical education for Blacks, whose entry into American industry and business leadership he believed to be the road to equality. His political power was significant, but because he frequently argued for compromise with White Southerners, including on voting rights, he was also criticized by other Black activists, especially by W. E. B. Du Bois.
1. Chesnutt lectured at the Tuskegee Institute on Februrary 19, 1901, during a research and lecture trip to the South. He described his impressions after his return in the Boston Transcript in "The Black and the White" and "The Negro's Franchise" as well as in the Cleveland Leader article "A Visit to Tuskegee". [back]
2. The Tuskegee Institute (now University), in Tuskegee, Alabama, evolved from the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, founded in 1881, with Booker T. Washington as its first president. It became a leading educational institution for Blacks in the South, emphasizing teacher training and industrial education. Chesnutt, who had himself been the principal of a Black normal school in the early 1880s, first visited Tuskegee in February 1901, and remained well-informed about and personally connected with the institution all his life. [back]
3. Walter Hines Page (1855–1918) was a renowned journalist and editor who was born in North Carolina and rose to fame in the publishing worlds of Boston and New York. In 1895, he began working for Houghton, Mifflin & Company as literary editor, and eventually as editor-in-chief of their flagship magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. He left in 1899 and eventually founded his own publishing house with a partner, Frank Nelson Doubleday (1862–1934), named Doubleday, Page & Co. He was its vice president until 1913, when he became U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Chesnutt and Page corresponded regularly from 1897 to 1905, but only sporadically afterwards. [back]
4. The World's Work was a monthly magazine launched by Walter Hines Page for his publishing house, Doubleday, Page, & Co., in November of 1900, with the goal to cover U.S. news from a business perspective. It was published until 1932, initially with Page himself as the editor, and after 1913 by his son Arthur. [back]
5. A quotation from the unsigned article "The Outlook for Young Men" in the "March of Events" section of the very first number of The World's Work, Vol. 1, Issue 1, November 1900, pp. 8–9. [back]
6. The Outlook (from 1870–1893 called the Christian Union) was a popular weekly magazine, based in New York City, edited by Congregationalist theologian Lyman Abbott (1835–1922) from 1881 until his death. The Outlook published one of Chesnutt's short stories, "The Sway-Backed House," in 1900. [back]
7. Booker T. Washington's memoir Up from Slavery was serialized in The Outlook from November 3, 1900 to February 23, 1901 and then published in book form. [back]
8. "The Sway-Backed House" appeared in The Outlook on November 3, 1900 (vol. 66, no. 10, 588–593), in the same issue that contained the first installment of Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery. [back]
9. The House Behind the Cedars (Houghton Mifflin, 1900) was Chesnutt's first published novel. House evolved over more than a decade from a short story, "Rena Walden," first drafted in the late 1880s. It was the only novel by Chesnutt to be serialized, once in 1900-1901 in the monthly Self Culture and again in 1921-1922 in the Black weekly Chicago Defender. House was also his only novel to be adapted to film (1924 and 1932). [back]
10. In its first year of publication, The Conjure Woman received more than seventy reviews, including in major city newspapers (e.g., the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Constitution, and the San Francisco Chronicle) and in weekly and monthly magazines. [back]
