Plum Bun - Other Novels of Passing and The Color Line

Other Novels of Passing and The Color Line

  • Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in the same year, has a very similar plot: A light-skinned African American woman pretends to be white and becomes involved with a white supremacist.
  • In her novel Joy, set two generations later, Marsha Hunt's eponymous heroine, herself too dark-skinned to pass for white, only associates with white people because she believes that they are superior and that she will find fulfillment in life that way.
  • Another passing narrative is Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, where a light-skinned man passes in order to be able to join the army during World War II and goes on to live the rest of his life as a Jewish professor.
  • Erskine Caldwell's short story "Saturday Afternoon" depicts a lynching in very much the same way as the story Anthony Cross tells about his father's violent death in Georgia.

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