DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and Selected Essays" by Charles W. Chesnutt. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Chesnutt's second major work of fiction, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, was published in 1899 by Houghton Mifflin. In this collection of nine short stories set in Ohio and North Carolina, Chesnutt scrutinizes the sociological and psychological effects of Jim Crow laws and practices on white, black, and mixed-race communities. Chesnutt insightfully and often satirically reveals not only the difficulties faced by racially blended individuals but also their intense prejudices against more darkly shaded African Americans. Throughout The Wife of His Youth, Charles Chesnutt repeatedly unveils the nation's hypocrisy in claiming social equality among the races while gradually embracing the fierce system of segregation that characterized the North and the South at that time.

"The Wife of His Youth" is a short story by American author Charles W. Chesnutt, first published in July 1898. It later served as the title story of the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line. That book was first published in 1899, the same year Chesnutt published his short story collection The Conjure Woman."The Wife of His Youth" features an upwardly mobile, light-skinned mulatto man, a respected member of the Blue Veins Society in a Midwestern city. He is preparing to marry another light-skinned mulatto woman when a much darker woman comes to him seeking her husband, whom she has not seen in 25 years. The story, which was met positively upon its publication, has become Chesnutt's most anthologized work.The story has been read as an analysis of race relations, not between black and white but within the black community, exploring its own color and class prejudices. The main character dreams of becoming white but ultimately seems to accept being black and the full history of African Americans in the United States. The ending of the story, however, has been called ambiguous and leaves several questions unanswered.

Ten wonderful stories by pioneer of African-American fiction: "The Goophered Grapevine," "Po' Sandy," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," "The Wife of His Youth," "Dave's Neckliss," "The Passing of Grandison," more. Witty, charming, insightful.

The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899) is a collection of short stories by African American writer, lawyer, and political activist Charles Chesnutt. Originally published in a July 1888 edition of The Atlantic—in which, in 1887, Chesnutt became the first African American to have a story published in its pages—“The Wife of His Youth” has become the author’s most frequently anthologized story. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line contains nine stories and three essays by Charles Chesnutt, a pioneer of African American literature. The title story of the collection follows Mr. Ryder, a light skinned man living in a city in the American Midwest. The founder of the Blue Veins Society, a local club whose members consist of black men with European ancestry, Mr. Ryder plans to propose to a beautiful mixed-race woman named Molly Dixon. As the day of the Blue Vein Ball approaches—he hopes to propose on stage while giving a speech—Ryder meets an older black woman named Liza Jane who assisted her husband, Sam Taylor, in escaping north before the Civil War, but never heard from him again. “The Passing of Grandison,” another story in the collection, is a tale of racial passing set in the 1850s that follows a slave who travels to Canada with the help of a white man. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line is a masterful work of short fiction and essay writing from a pioneer of African American literature. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.