Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man-Fast Shipping

Description

Title: Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Author: James Weldon Johnson

ISBN: 0809000326

Publisher: Hill and Wang

Published: 1991

Binding: Paperback

Language: English

Edition: Reprint

Number of Pages: 212

Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

Publisher :

James Weldon Johnson’s emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction.

The first fictional memoir ever written by a black, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. In the 1920s and since, it has also given white readers a startling new perspective on their own culture, revealing to many the double standard of racial identity imposed on black by a mulatto man whose light skin allows him to “pass” for white, the novel describes a pilgrimage through America’s color lines at the turn of the century–from a black college in Jacksonville to an elite New York nightclub, from the rural South to the white suburbs of the Northeast. This is a powerful, unsentimental examination of race in America, a hymn to the anguish of forging an identity in a nation obsessed with color. And, as Arna Bontemps pointed out decades ago, “the problems of the artist [as presented here] seem as contemporary as if the book had been written this year.”