The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

A
repackaged edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black
experience in America, with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

First published anonymously in 1912, this novel gave many
white readers their first glimpse of the double standard-and double
consciousness-that ruled the lives of Black people in 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 emerged as a
groundbreaking 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. VINTAGE CLASSICS.