Further Details

Title: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Condition: New
Author: James Weldon Johnson
Contributor: Gregory Pardlo (Introduction by)
Format: Hardback
ISBN-10: 1841594067
EAN: 9781841594064
ISBN: 9781841594064
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Genre: Fiction
Topic: Classic Fiction, Historical Fiction
Release Date: 13/10/2022
Description:

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by Black people in modern 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 became a pioneering 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.

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