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 * Mark Twain's 1894 novel, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, is a scathing satire of passing in the antebellum south. Roxy, a slave, is only one-sixteenth black; in order to avoid being sold down the river, she decides to switch her own baby (who is only 1/32 black) and a white baby she is caring for. Her own baby, Tom, who passes for white, is raised as a spoiled aristocrat, but when his true identity becomes known, he is sold down the river.
 * Writing in the late 19th century, Charles W. Chesnutt explored issues of mixed-race people passing for white in several of his short stories and novels set in the South after the American Civil War. It was a tumultuous time, with dramatic social changes following the emancipation of slaves, many of whom were mixed race because of white men having taken sexual advantage of slave women.
 * In 1912, James Weldon Johnson anonymously published The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which depicts the life of a biracial man who, after witnessing a lynching, chooses to live as white, but who thereby relinquishes his talent for and dream of making music steeped in African American roots.
 * Jessie Redmon Fauset published Plum Bun in 1928, a novel in which the African American protagonist, Angela Murray, tries to leverage her light skin tone to gain social advantage, but she discovers a deeper need for honesty than for societal acceptance.
 * Nella Larsen's 1929 novella, Passing, deals with two biracial women's racial identities and their social experience: one generally passes for white and has married white; the other is married to a black man and lives in the black community of Harlem. She occasionally passes for white for convenience, as it was a time of social segregation in some public facilities.
 * Langston Hughes wrote several pieces related to passing, including two relevant short stories. One, titled "Passing" in the 1934 collection The Ways of White Folks, concerns a son who thanks his mother for literally passing him on the street as he is passing for white. The other, titled "Who's Passing for Who" (1952), portrays a couple whose racial ambiguity leads to questioning whether they are passing for white or for black.
 * Unpublished in Regina M. Anderson's lifetime, the one-act play "The Man Who Passed" narrates the plight of Fred Carrington, a former Harlem resident who, after years of passing as white, returns to the friends he has abandoned to face the many consequences of his leaving.
 * Black Like Me (1961) was an account by journalist John Howard Griffin about his experiences as a Southern white man passing as black in the late 1950s.