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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

James Weldon Johnson, Gregory Pardlo

From Shelf: New hardbacks to look forward to, October 22

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by 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-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and 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-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 colour.

Format:
Hardback
Pages:
184
Publisher:
Everyman
ISBN:
9781841594064
Published Date:
13/10/2022
Dimensions:
210mm x 134mm x 12mm
Weight:
319g
Category:
Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

RRP: £14

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 9781841594064


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