James Weldon Johnson

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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

First published anonymously in 1912, this novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard-and double consciousness-that ruled the lives of Black people in America.  

First published anonymously in 1912, this novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard-and double consciousness-that ruled the lives of Black people in America.

Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man emerged as a groundbreaking document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century-from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but colour. VINTAGE CLASSICS.