First published anonymously in 1912 this resolutely unsentimental novel gavemany white readers their first glimpse of the double standard and doubleconsciousne... » 

First published anonymously in 1912 this resolutely unsentimental novel gavemany white readers their first glimpse of the double standard and doubleconsciousness that ruled the lives of black people in modern America.Republished in 1927 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance with anintroduction by Carl Van Vechten The Autobiography of an ExColoured Manbecame a groundbreaking document of AfroAmerican culture the first firstperson novel ever written by a black it became an eloquent model for laternovelists 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 noveldescribes a journey through the strata of black society at the turn of thecentury from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club inNew York from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out therhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man is a complex andmoving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what itmeant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing butcolor. «