The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man: With an Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Softcover

Johnson, James Weldon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679727531 ISBN 13: 9780679727538

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1989

Synopsis

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard -- and double consciousness -- that ruled the lives of 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-Coloured Man became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture; the first first-person novel ever written by a black, it became 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-Coloured 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.

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."

From the Back Cover

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard -- and double consciousness -- that ruled the lives of 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-Coloured Man became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture; the first first-person novel ever written by a black, it became 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-Coloured 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679727531
• ISBN 13: 9780679727538
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256