To appreciate Chesnutt's odd relationship to his masterpiece, it is necessary to consider the popularity of local color writing in late-nineteenth-century America and to review some details of the book's composition history.
Chesnutt was proud of the critical success accorded to his collection of dialect tales, but he understood himself as a different sort of writer, and he remained throughout his career deeply ambivalent about his own work in the local color mode. Unlike Anderson's and Hemingway's intensely personal and carefully integrated works, however, The Conjure Woman came into existence almost as an afterthought, and the book's formal construction might be said to reflect the vision of its editor more fully than that of its author. Indeed, Chesnutt's slim volume deserves to be included with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1924), and other classic titles on a short list of America's finest story collections. The Conjure Woman (1899) is by any measure a seminal text in the African American literary tradition and a premier achievement of the late-nineteenth-century local color movement. It is a curious fact of literary history that the collection of stories for which Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) will be remembered as a major American author is one he never envisioned himself.
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