The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man - Softcover

Johnson, James Weldon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1613824157 ISBN 13: 9781613824153

Publisher: Simon & Brown, 2013

Synopsis

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored ManBy James Weldon Johnson

About this title

About the Author

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University. During his six-year stay in Hispanic America he completed his most famous book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man which was published anonymously in 1912. It was only during 1927 that Johnson admitted his authorship - stressing that it was not a work of autobiography but mostly fictional. Other works include The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), Black Manhattan (1930), his exploration of the contribution of African-Americans to the culture of New York, and Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book advocating civil rights for African Americans. Johnson was also an anthologist. His anthologies concerned African-American themes and were part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. He also wrote the melody for the song Dem Bones. In 1922, he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, which the Academy of American Poets calls "a major contribution to the history of African-American literature." One of the works for which he is best remembered today, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, was published in 1927 and celebrates the tradition of the folk preacher. In 1917, Johnson published 50 Years and Other Poems.

About the Author

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is one of the world's greatest literary figures. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he left school at fourteen and in 1876 went to London, where he began his literary career with a series of unsuccessful novels. In 1884 he became a founder of the Fabian Society, the famous British socialist organization. After becoming a reviewer and drama critic, he published a study of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1891 and became determined to create plays as he felt Ibsen did: to shake audiences out of their moral complacency and to attack social problems. However, Shaw was an irrepressible wit, and his plays are as entertaining as they are socially provocative. Basically shy, Shaw created a public persona for himself: G.B.S., a bearded eccentric, crusading social critic, antivivisectionist, language reformer, strict vegetarian, and renowned public speaker. The author of fifty-three plays, hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, and several books, Shaw is best known for Widowers' Houses (1892), Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1913), Heartbreak House (1919), and Saint Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Brown
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1613824157
• ISBN 13: 9781613824153
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 124