Title: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Author: James Weldon Johns
Narrator: Richard Allen
Length: 6 hours
Published in: 1912
Genre: fiction
ISBN: 9781624061912
Source: public library
Reason for Reading: Title and cover intrigued me
Rating: 4/5
SUMMARY (Goodreads):
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.”
My Thoughts: As a history-lover, I really found this story intriguing. The time of the story–early 1900s–is a really complex time in America and to read such a one-of-a-kind narrative, however fictional it may be, only piqued my interest all the more.
Title: Mrs. Queen Takes the Train
Books Finished:
Title: The Thursday War
