Readers' Reports

This section offers page images of the readers' reports created by Houghton Mifflin in response to submissions by Chesnutt. The reports were evaluations of the literary merits and commercial prospects of submissions. Chesnutt submitted fiction to the Boston publishing firm for forty years (1891–1931) and these reports, now held at the Houghton library, Harvard University, provide a window into how Chesnutt's fiction was read by the firm. For now we provide only page images and select metadata, but in the future we hope to be able to provide full transcriptions.