"AMERICA’S FIRST GREAT BLACK NOVELIST": IMPORTANT FIRST EDITION OF CHARLES CHESNUTT'S FIRST BOOK, THE CONJURE WOMAN, 1899, DEFINING HIS INTENT TO USE "LITERATURE AS A WEAPON THAT COULD DEFEAT RACISM," VERY SCARCE IN ORIGINAL CLOTH

CHESNUTT, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899. Octavo, original pictorial, gilt-stamped brown cloth. $4000.

First edition of the very elusive first book by Chesnutt—"among the major American fiction writers of the 19th century"—a key volume of seven stories fusing "tradition with new forms… ancient mythology with African American folklore," in colorful original cloth.

Born in 1858 of mixed descent and light-skinned, Chesnutt chose to live and work as a Black man. Trained as a lawyer, he is widely viewed as having "no peer in Afro-American fiction written before his time… Chesnutt saw the creation of literature as a weapon that could defeat racism" (Gates, Signifying Monkey, 116). The tales in Conjure Woman, his first book, deftly subvert 19th-century "plantation fiction and the racial ideologies that inform it" (Nowatzki, Passing in a White Genre, 27). With this radically innovative work Chesnutt introduced the "'lore' of 'conjuration,' African American hoodoo beliefs and practices" (Gates, Norton, 603). Invoking the "oral heritage of African peoples: stories within stories, spoken language, call and response, hyperbole, personification and signifying… Conjure Woman evinces his deliberate referencing of these cultural traditions." Each of the seven stories—Goophered Grapevine, Po' Sandy, Mars Jeems's Nightmare, Conjurer's Revenge, Sis' Becky's Pickaninny, Gray Wolf's Ha'nt and Hot-Foot Hanibal—offers a dual narrative structure, in which "a white Yankee narrator, John, who has bought a plantation in the South… introduces the often extraordinary 'yarn' spun by a Black narrator, a former slave named Uncle Julius" (Cotennet, Lives of a Book, 82). Often featured is Aun' Peggy, "a conjure woman who works magic and casts spells, as a primary character. Her spells and magic are the enslaved's primary defense against the inhumanity of enslavement" (Montgomery, Testing & Tricking).

Chesnutt, ranked by Eric Sundquist "among the major American fiction writers of the 19th century" (To Wake the Nations, 12), early decided to "write about the Black condition for a white audience… he believed that if whites could truly understand the Black situation… they could be moved to change it." That meaning emerges in Mars Jeems's Nightmare: about a woman who changes a white slave owner into a Black slave. Chesnutt notably complicates the tale by using "two conjurers: Aun' Peggy who turns Mars Jeems black" and Julius, "one of Chesnutt's most important figures" (McWilliams, Charles Chesnutt, 601-2). Esteemed "America's first great Black novelist… Chesnutt fused tradition with new forms, realism with romance, ancient mythology with African-American folklore, and love stories with the law" (Dowling, Charles Chesnutt). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., asked to "recommend ten works of fiction" for those "wanting to get a handle on the canon" of African American fiction, listed Conjure Woman first (New Yorker). First edition, first printing: no statement of edition or printing on the copyright page. As issued without dust jacket. Precedes the same year's Large Paper edition (150 copies). Goophered Grapevine serialized in Atlantic Monthly (1887); Conjurer's Revenge in Overland Monthly (1889). Blockson 5048. Work, 472.

Text very fresh, front free endpaper and rear inner hinge expertly repaired, soiling to spine of colorful original cloth.