Negro Tales

Cotter, Joseph S. (Joseph Seamon), 1861-1949Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.4

Word count: 154K words
Chapters: 16

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Negro Tales by Joseph S. CotterAuthor: Cotter, Joseph S. (Joseph Seamon), 1861-1949,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Dec 9, 2012

Editor's review

Negro Tales is a short-story collection by the African American writer Joseph S. Cotter, an early instance in American literature of a Black author shaping folk narrative and lived experience in literary form. The stories draw largely on oral tradition and everyday observation, with dialect coloring and a storytelling feel; their brevity makes them well suited to studying the shape of early twentieth-century African American narrative literature. As a public-domain text, its value lies more in literary history and cultural record: readers can observe how stories are told, how characters are shaped, and how folk humor and pathos coexist. Read it out of research or personal interest rather than expecting the continuous plot of a modern novel, and attend to its verbal texture and narrative perspective.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in African American literature and oral tradition
Literary enthusiasts studying early twentieth-century American short narrative
Readers who enjoy folk tales, dialect narrative, and the short-story form
Students and teachers who want to engage with public-domain African American literary texts

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting modern long-form plots and complete character arcs
Beginners with little patience for English dialect spelling and old-fashioned expression
Readers who need a contemporary framework for analyzing social issues

Reading tips

Read one or two stories at a time, leaving room to savor the language and narrative manner.
Start with the opening story and continue once you are used to the dialect rhythm.
Read alongside chapters on oral tradition in histories of American literature.
Don't look up every dialect spelling—understand the gist from context.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Are these stories folk legends or original fiction?

The available information indicates that this is a collection of American short stories, and the author, Cotter, had a background in literary creation and in collecting folk narrative. The sources of individual pieces should be checked against the original book; in reading, they can be treated as story texts with the coloring of oral tradition.

The book uses dialect—will it be hard to understand?

Parts of the narrative carry dialect spelling and colloquial rhythm, which may feel unfamiliar at first. Read for the gist from context rather than matching every word to standard spelling; after one or two stories the rhythm becomes noticeably smoother.

Is it suitable for classroom use?

It can serve as supplementary material for courses on American literature or oral tradition and is suited to selected readings and discussion. Because the text is from an early period, teachers should provide background to help students understand the language and narrative context.

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About the author

Cotter, Joseph S. (Joseph Seamon), 1861-1949 Author · American · 1861–1949

Joseph S. Cotter (1861–1949) was an African American poet and teacher active from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth. He worked for many years in education and was also known as a poet, particularly for his use of dialect, which gave his writing a plain yet vivid language close to Black folk life and oral tradition. His representative work is Negro Tales, and he also wrote Caleb. At present only one of his works is held in this collection, and public information about his life and the full range of his writing is limited; on the available evidence, however, he belongs to the early tradition of African American literature known for dialect poetry and folk narrative, and his writing has some significance for preserving and presenting Black dialect culture while leaving texts that later African American literature could look to.