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

Johnson, James Weldon

ISBN 10: 0679727531 / ISBN 13: 9780679727538

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (edition Reissue), 1989

About this Item

The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way. Markings in workbook.

Seller Inventory # 0679727531-7-1-117

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man: With an Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (edition Reissue)
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679727531
• ISBN 13: 9780679727538
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: Reissue.
• Condition: Fair

About this title

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 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."