The Quarry

Bringing to life the culture of Harlem in the 1920s, Charles Chestnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and aesthetic milieu of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters, The Quarry is peopled with so many figures of the time - including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey - that it constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American history.

Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man, whose adoptive black parents are determined that he become a leader in the black community. Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.