The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
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Paperback ©1960--
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Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Annotation: Gripping novel of a light-skinned African American who passes for white and forges a new identity in a nation obsessed with color.
 
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Catalog Number: #4570912
Format: Paperback
Common Core/STEAM: Common Core Common Core
Copyright Date: 1960
Edition Date: 1991 Release Date: 03/01/91
Pages: xii, 211 pages
ISBN: 0-8090-0032-6
ISBN 13: 978-0-8090-0032-6
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 97183878
Dimensions: 22 cm.
Language: English
Reading Level: 9.0
Interest Level: 9+
Reading Counts!: reading level:9.0 / points:13.0 / quiz:Q28704
Lexile: 1100L

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."


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