The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Introduction by Gregory Pardlo |
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| Author:
| Johnson, James Weldon |
| Introduction by:
| Pardlo, Gregory |
| Series title: | Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-0-593-53556-1 |
| Publication Date: | Nov 2022 |
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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| Imprint: | Everyman's Library |
| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $24.00 |
Book Description:
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A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later. 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...
More Description A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later.
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.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.