The Conjure Woman

The Conjure Woman is a collection of short stories by African-American fiction writer, essayist, and activist Charles W. Chesnutt. First published in 1899, The Conjure Woman is considered a seminal work of African-American literature composed of seven short stories, set in Patesville, North Carolina. A film adaptation, The Conjure Woman (film) was made by Oscar Micheaux.

Background

Chesnutt wrote the collection's first story, "The Goophered Grapevine", in 1887 and published it in The Atlantic Monthly. Later that year, Chesnutt traveled to Boston and met with Walter Hines Page, an editor at the Houghton Mifflin Company. Page asked Chesnutt to forward some of his writing, which was the beginning of a multiple-year correspondence between the two.

Chesnutt wrote three more of the stories between 1887 and 1889 he called "Conjure Tales", two of which would eventually appear in The Conjure Woman. The stories were "Po' Sandy" published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, and "The Conjurer's Revenge" published in Overland Monthly in June 1889. In March of 1898, Page wrote Chesnutt to inform him that Houghton Mifflin would consider publishing a short-story collection with "the same original quality" as "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy". Over the next two months, Chesnutt wrote six additional stories, four of which were selected by Page and other editors at Houghton Mifflin to appear in The Conjure Woman, including "Mars Jeems's Nightmare", "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny", "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt", and "Hot-Foot Hannibal".