Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) was an African American author, essayist, political activist, and lawyer known for his fiction about race, identity, and social life in the post-Civil War South. He wrote influential short stories and novels such as "The Conjure Woman," "The House Behind the Cedars," and "The Marrow of Tradition," and was the first African American to publish fiction in The Atlantic Monthly.