$11.95

Tax-exempt?
Read this before you buy.

A novel about two African Americans who pass for white in post-Civil War North Carolina in order to earn a rightful share of the American dream

In The House Behind the Cedars, a novel about two African Americans who pass for white in post-Civil War North Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt introduces a striking new hero in American fiction of the color line: John Walden, a young black man who decides to pass for white in order to earn what he feels is his rightful share of the American dream.

Without sentimentality, Chesnutt's novel probes deeper than any before it into the white South's obsessions with race and privilege and still stands as one of the most authoritative and important explorations of miscegenation in all of American literature.

Charles W. Chesnutt, born in 1858, is generally acknowledged as the first publicly acclaimed African American novelist. Between 1885 and 1905 he published more than fifty tales and essays, two collections of short stories, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and three novels.

April 2000

ISBN 082032194X paper • $11.95