The House Behind the Cedars

The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutts nest novel, tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life. This edition revitalizes a much-neglected masterpiece by one of our most important African-American writers. As Werner Sollors writes, William Dean Howells did not overstate his case when he compared Chesnutts works with those by Turgenev, Maupassant, and James . . . and [Chesnutt] has become one of the most important crossover authors from the African-American tradition.