The House Behind the Cedars

Charles Chesnutt was perhaps the most influential African-American fiction writer during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The House Behind the Cedars, his dramatic masterpiece, was crafted during the tumultuous post-Civil War era in the South, when many in white society feared the "evils" of interracial relationships. Boldly, with vivid detail and memorable characters, this novel explores the practice of "passing," as John and Rena Walden, two light-skinned African Americans, step over the color line to share in the American Dream. Conceived by a novelist who himself had once considered "passing," The House Behind the Cedars continues as one of the bravest, most compelling, and most important explorations of racism in American fiction.