Was Donald Glover really what he seemed--a handsome, dedicated, and
clever African-American star of the Harlem Renaissance, whose looks made
him the "quarry" of a variety of women? Or could the secrets of his
birth change his destiny entirely? Focusing on the culture of Harlem in
the 1920s, Charles Chesnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and
aesthetic life of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem
Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters,
The Quarry is peopled with so many figures of the time--including
Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey--that it
constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American
history. Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man whose adoptive black
parents are determined that he become a leader of the black people.
Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story
depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also
the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape
prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.
Although he was the first African-American writer of fiction to gain
acceptance by America's white literary establishment, Charles W.
Chesnutt (1858-1932) has been eclipsed in popularity by other writers
who later rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. Recently,
this pathbreaking American writer has been receiving an increasing
amount of attention. Two of his novels, Paul Marchand, F.M.C.
(completed in 1921) and The Quarry (completed in 1928), were
considered too incendiary to be published during Chesnutt's lifetime.
Their publication now provides us not only the opportunity to read these
two books previously missing from Chesnutt's oeuvre but also the chance
to appreciate better the intellectual progress of this literary pioneer.
Chesnutt was the author of many other works, including The Conjure
Woman & Other Conjure Tales, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow
Tradition, and Mandy Oxendine. Princeton University Press recently
published To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905
(edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III).
Originally published in 1999.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from
the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions
preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting
them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the
Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich
scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by
Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
