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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