Publisher's Synopsis
The latest work from the pen of Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt, "The Marrow of Tradition," is a notable production. Indeed, it is the strongest and most absorbing story of Southern life which has yet come from that sectional phase of American life. Cable, Page, Tourgee and Joel Chandler Harris have penned with cunning fidelity stories of "Dixie land," and Harriet Beecher Stowe's great story was great because of the moral influence it exerted, rather than its artistic finish. In the "Marrow of Tradition" we find every phase of Southern life painted with such rare fidelity that at last appears the cultured and industrious phase of Afro-American life, not over done, but just as we know it to be. At last the Southern white aristocrat, "poor white," ante-bellum Negro and cultured Afro-American are placed in juxtaposition in a chef d'oeuvre of Charles W. Chestnutt, which easily puts him in the front rank of American novelists.
