The House Behind the Cedars (Modern Library Classics) - Softcover

Chesnutt, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812966163 ISBN 13: 9780812966169

Publisher: Modern Library, 2003

Synopsis

The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutt’s finest 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 Chesnutt’s works with those by Turgenev, Maupassant, and James . . . and [Chesnutt] has become one of the most important ‘crossover’ authors from the African-American tradition.”

About this title

From the Back Cover:

“A pioneering work about racial passing.”
—Werner Sollors, Harvard University

About the Author:

Judith Jackson Fossett, associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, is the author of Illuminated Darkness: Slavery and Its Shadows in Nineteenth-Century America and the editor of Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0812966163
• ISBN 13: 9780812966169
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256