Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the Civil War, his parents returned to their native Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Charles attended a school run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. After serving as principal of the State Colored Normal School from 1880 to 1883, he abandoned both his teaching career and a South that was increasingly hostile to African Americans. Moving back to Cleveland, he practiced law, established a successful legal stenography firm, and began pursuing a career as a writer. His first story, “Uncle Peter’s House,” about a newly emancipated Black family whose home is burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in 1885. It introduced the themes of folk life, racial injustice, and social reform that he would explore in dozens of short stories, essays, and three novels. By the time he died in 1932, Chesnutt was widely recognized as the dean of African American fiction writers. Robert B. Stepto is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama, Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography, and From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Among his edited volumes are Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Literature, Art, and Scholarship; Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction; and Harper American Literature. Jennifer Rae Greeson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature and of articles related to various aspects of American literature and culture.