The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man James Weldon Johnson

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards – and double consciousness – experienced by Black people in modern 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 became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.