The House Behind the Cedars - Tapa blanda

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 (1858–1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.