Oh, gosh, Charles Chesnutt! I haven't read him extensively but I did do a great deal of skimming in connection with a recent work project; it struck me that he had a remarkably sharp tongue and that he didn't often turn it loose. I noted a couple of lines I especially liked, one from The Marrow of Tradition: "In early life Mrs. Ochiltree had been accustomed to impale fools on epigrams, like flies on pins, to see them wriggle." Another, I found in The Conjure Woman: "My wife and I were seated on the front piazza, she wearily but conscientiously ploughing through a missionary report, while I followed the impossible career of the blonde heroine of a rudimentary novel." "A rudimentary novel," isn't that just great? I also read a couple of the stories in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, and those I found leaden -- "worthy," pious. It feels wrong to criticize that quality -- it seems so obvious why he would feel the need to take a serious and humorless tone -- but, speaking at least for myself: how grateful I would have been to read more of his writing in which he deployed that sharp wit. At least as far as I can make out from his Wikipedia entry, it doesn't seem as if his correspondence has been collected -- I wonder what he sounded like when he wrote to friends.