The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Introduction by Gregory Pardlo

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of
the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later.

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.

Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to pass for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century-from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 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 color.

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.