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.