Chesnutt's first novel is the great early American novel of passing. Rena Walden, the mixed-race daughter of a North Carolina family, follows her brother John — who has remade himself as John Warwick, a white lawyer in a South Carolina city — and is educated, polished, and presented to society as Rowena Warwick. The white aristocrat George Tryon falls in love with her and they are engaged; then a summons home to her sick mother puts Rena, by chance, in Tryon's sight in her own people's world, and the knowledge destroys the engagement and breaks Rena herself. Chesnutt, light-skinned enough to pass and unwilling to, writes the color line from inside the family it divided. Oscar Micheaux filmed the novel in 1927.
Author: Charles W. Chesnutt · Original publisher: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (Boston and New York), 1900
