Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Johnson, James Weldon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143105175 ISBN 13: 9780143105176

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2008

Synopsis

Along This Way The autobiography of the celebrated African American writer and civil rights activist Published just four years before his death in 1938, James Weldon Johnson's autobiography is a fascinating portrait of an African American who broke the racial divide at a time when the Harlem Renaissance had not yet begun to usher in the civil rights movement. Not only an educator, lawyer, and diplomat, Johnson ... Full description

About this title

About the Author

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871. Among the first to break through the barriers segregating his race, he was educated at Atlanta University and at Columbia and was the first black admitted to the Florida bar. He was also, for a time, a songwriter in New York, American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, executive secretary of the NAACP, and professor of creative literature at Fisk University--experiences recorded in his autobiography, Along This Way. Other books by him include Saint Peter Relates an Incident, Black Manhattan, and God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. In addition to his own writing, Johnson was the editor of pioneering anthologies of black American poetry and spirituals. He died in 1938.

From the Back Cover

This book is an emotionally gripping novel of a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. It's influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale. In the 1920s and since, it has also given white readers a startling new perspective on their own culture, revealing to many the double standard of racial identity imposed on black Americans.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0143105175
• ISBN 13: 9780143105176
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448