<DIV>Rejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," <b>Charles W. Chesnutt</b> broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life. <br><br> <b>The Conjure Woman</b> (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published <b>The Wife of His Youth</b>, and <b>Other Stories of the Color Line</b>, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, <b>The House Behind the Cedars</b> (1900), is a study of racial passing. <b>The Marrow of Tradition</b> (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era. <br><br> Nine uncollected short stories round out the volume's fiction, including conjure tales omitted from <b>The Conjure Woman</b> and two stories that are unavailable in any other edition. Eight essays highlight his prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself. </div>