A Business Career [Hardcover]

Charles W. Chesnutt (Author), Matthew Wilson (Editor), Marjan van Schaik (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2005

Never before published, A Business Career is the story of Stella Merwin, a white woman entering the working-class world to discover the truth behind her upper-class father's financial failure. A "New Woman" of the 1890s, Stella joins a stenographer's office and uncovers a life-altering secret that allows her to regain her status and wealth.

When Charles W. Chesnutt died in 1932, he left behind six manuscripts unpublished, A Business Career among them. Along with novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar, it is one of the first written by an African American who crosses the color line to write 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 Hines 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 till you do find one," he wrote. Page clearly 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, The Marrow of Tradition, The Colonel's Dream, as well as the posthumously published novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. from University Press of Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Attempting to move his career beyond that of a black writer constrained to writing about black people, in the late 1890s Chesnutt joined Paul Laurence Dunbar in writing what were called "white-life" novels. In A Business Career, Stella Merwin's family has fallen on hard times since the death of her father, ostensibly cheated by his business partner, Wendell Truscott. Stella is entering the working class as her family continues to adjust to their lower social status. Stella takes a position as Truscott's stenographer, under an assumed name, in an effort to discover exactly how her father was cheated. From her vantage point, she eventually develops an admiration for Truscott and the secret behind her family's situation. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher

Provides first printing of a previously unpublished work by an African American innovator in early 20th-century fiction

Offers one of the earliest examples of "white-life" fiction, in which African Americans wrote about white American experience

Features an introduction by noted Chesnutt scholar Matthew Wilson

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 218 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (June 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578067618
• ISBN-13: 978-1578067619
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,326,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Business Career: A Timeless Novel, December 16, 2007

By 

John M. Freiermuth "John M. Freiermuth" (Greensboro, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Business Career (Hardcover)

John M. Freiermuth

Stella Mervin stops by the business office of Mrs. Paxton, the proprietress of a company that provides temporary stenographers for other business offices. Stella is the beautiful, daughter of a failed business tycoon who lost his company and life in a business crisis that left his wife and two children in a vastly reduced situation. Being raised in reduced circumstances, Stella adapts the outlook of the "Modern Woman" and prepares for a fall-back position as a stenographer, just in case she does not earn an MRS shortly after gaining her BA.
That same morning Mr. Peters, the private secretary and stenographer for Mr. Truscott, the chief executive of Truscott Refining Company, was fired. An urgent call went out to Mrs. Paxton to provide a temporary stenographer for a day or two until a new stenographer could be found. The temporary position is filled by Stella "Smith" as the plot starts to develop.
The latest posthumous novel of Charles W. Chesnutt, A Business Career, is the most timeless of his novels. It combines some epistolary elements made popular by Richardson's Clarissa, in the 18th Century; a delightful heroine like Jane Austen's Emma who fell in love with an older, patrician hero of the early 19th Century; a heroine who finds herself the "Modern Woman" as advocated by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Dorothy Dix, Marion Harland, and others at the beginning of the 20th Century; and deals with the modern Robber Barons of the early 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century where CEOs plead innocence of wrong doing after their Fortune-Fifty-equivalent corporations fail because the naïve CEOs were duped by cunning underlings. If you like the early through modern British and American novels, there is much that is familiar here.