The autobiography of an ex-coloured man (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of The autobiography of an ex-coloured man Saturday, August 1 2009.

• 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 Americans. Narrated 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."

Shelfari edited the contributors of The autobiography of an ex-coloured man Saturday, July 25 2009.

• Added a contributor: James Weldon Johnson: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The autobiography of an ex-coloured man Friday, July 17 2009.

• I KNOW THAT IN WRITING THE FOLLOWING PAGES I AM divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyse the motives which prompt me to do it.