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Powerful and unflinching,
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a stark portrait of black experience in late nineteenth-century America and remains relevant to this day.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Dr. Sam Halliday.
James Weldon Johnson's fictional narrator first learns about his black heritage from a schoolteacher, a discovery which sparks a lifelong search for his place in the world. After his beloved mother dies, he embarks on a journey across America and beyond, first finding refuge in Georgia's all-black church community. There, his passion and skill for music flourishes and takes him from New York to Europe, playing ragtime for a rich white gentleman. Back in America's South, he witnesses an event so terrifying that it drives him to turn his back on his own heritage.
About the author
James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, 1871. He trained in music and in 1901 moved to New York with his brother John; together they wrote around two hundred songs for Broadway. His first book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912, was not a great success until he reissued it in his own name in 1927. In that time he established his reputation as a writer and became known in the Harlem Renaissance for his poems and for collating anthologies of poems by other black writers. Through his work as a civil rights activist he became the first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. He died in 1938.
Summary
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a powerful, trailblazing novel that exposes the intricate relationship between race and class in late nineteenth-century America.
Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Dr Sam Halliday.
After losing his mother at a very young age, the narrator is thrust from his comfortable, middle-class environment, afforded by his distant but aristocratic father, into the wider world. His passion for music begins in Georgia’s all-black church community and takes him from New York, where he plays ragtime for a rich white gentleman, to the South, where he witnesses lynchings and out of fear gives up his passion, as well as his race, to pass for white. Relevant to this day, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an unflinching account of black experience in America.
Foreword
A compellingly powerful novel about racial relations that is as relevant now as it was one hundred years ago.
