The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

With a new Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard--and double consciousness--that ruled the lives of black people in modern America. Republished at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture: the first, first-person novel ever written by an African American, which would ultimately influence such greats as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. It 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 the color of one's skin.