The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a pioneering novel that delves into the double standards and double consciousness experienced by Black people in modern America. It was first published anonymously in 1912 and republished in 1927, during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel, narrated by a man who passes for white, explores the strata of Black society and examines the question of race and identity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 184 pages
Publication date: 13 October 2022
Publisher: Everyman

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 color.

Weight: 320g
Dimension: 210 x 132 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781841594064