A Business Career

About the Book

A B O U T T H E B O O K A Business Career is the story of Stella Merwin, a white woman entering the working-class world to discover the truth behind her upperclass father's financial failure. A"New Woman"of the 1890$, Stella joins a stenographer's office and uncovers a life-altering secret that allows her to regain her status and wealth. When Chesnutt died in 1932,he left behind sixmanuscripts unpublished , A Business Career among them. Along with novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar, it is one of the first written by an African American to cross the color line and write exclusively about the white world. It is also one of only two Chesnutt novels with a female protagonist. Rejecting the novel for publication,Houghton Mifflin editor Walter Hiñes Page encouraged Chesnutt to try to get the book in print. "You will doubtless be able to find a publisher, and my advice to you is decidedly to keep trying tillyou do find one,"he wrote. Pageclearly saw that in A Business Career Chesnutt had written a successful popular novel grounded in realism but one that exploits elements of romance. Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an innovative and influential African American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His novels include The House Behind the Cedars, TheMarrow of Tradition, The Colonel's Dream, as well as the posthumously published novel Paul Marchand, F.M.G from UniversityPress of Mississippi . MATTHEW WILSON has written introductions to A Business Career, Evelyn's Husband, and Paul Marchand, F.M.C., and is the author of Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, all from University Press of Mississippi. He is associate professor of humanities and writing at Penn State University, Harrisburg. MARJAN A. VAN SCHAIK edited both A Business Career and Evelyn's Husband along with Wilson and is a part-time instructor at MillersvilleUniversity. ...