# The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

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- Book: [The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man](https://www.bookquiver.com/james-weldon-johnson/the-autobiography-of-an-ex-colored-man) ([The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/james-weldon-johnson/the-autobiography-of-an-ex-colored-man.md))
- Authors: [James Weldon Johnson](https://www.bookquiver.com/james-weldon-johnson)
- Publisher: Everyman
- ISBN: 978-18-4159-406-4
- Pages: 184
- Published: 2022-10-13
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## Description

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.