The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: A novel (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) - Softcover

Johnson, James Weldon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469607 ISBN 13: 9780593469606

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023

Synopsis

A repackaged edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America, with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. <p/>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. <p/> 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 color. VINTAGE CLASSICS.

About this title

About the Author

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)--novelist, poet, lawyer, editor, ethnomusicologist--was also the coauthor (with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson) of the hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing, widely accepted as the Negro National Anthem.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593469607
• ISBN 13: 9780593469606
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192