Although he appeared to most observers to be white, American author Charles Waddell Chestnutt had some African-American ancestry and thus was subjected to the limited opportunities, discrimination, and segregated living conditions that faced African-Americans in the United States throughout his life. An accomplished writer, Chestnutt created The House Behind the Cedars as a means of trying to depict the multidimensional complexity of race relations in the nineteenth-century American South. Recommended for fans of literary realism and social issue novels.