ABSTRACT

“Why the colored, Bill?” my mother inquired in the summer of 1972 during a conversation we had after I told her I had decided to write a doctoral dissertation on an African American writer named Charles W. Chesnutt. “Why are you so interested in colored authors?” My mother's tone was more nonplussed than disapproving. I don't recall how I responded to her, but it was probably vague, deliberately so. A product of the post-World War II suburban South, I had learned almost nothing in my education about how to talk about race in my own family, let alone communicate my growing sense of intellectual commitment to investigating the color line in turn-of-the-century American literature.