The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

JOHNSON, James Weldon.

$5,000.00

Item Number: 124993

Boston: Sherman, French & Company, 1912.

First edition of the work the central text of the Harlem Renaissance, hailed as the link between 19th and 20th African American narratives. Octavo, original cloth stamped in gilt. In very good condition. Rare.

A dedicated civil rights leader, Johnson was at the core of the Harlem Renaissance. "One of the exceptional figures of the 20th century… he used literature to call attention to the urgent political and social plight of black Americans. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published in 1912, related the life of a character of mixed ancestry who passes for white… The African American tradition in American literature has its paternity more in James Weldon Johnson than in anyone else" (Wilson, Preface to Along this Way). Johnson's only novel, it is "arguably the central text of the Harlem Renaissance and by most reckonings one of the dozen key documents that best reflect the American experience." Issued anonymously, the novel "interweaves personal experience, sociological observation and social protest… Johnson began writing Autobiography at the end of a brief stint as a lyricist in musical theatre; he published it six years later, while serving as an American consul in Latin America… When the text was reissued as fiction in 1927—at the height of the Harlem Renaissance—it carried his name and had a cover designed by Aaron Douglas and an introduction by Van Vechten… In the 1970s critics attempting to articulate a black literary tradition considered the novel a link between 19th and 20th African American narratives. Both Houston Baker and Robert Stepto hailed it as an important revision of the slave narrative and a forerunner of black protest fiction" (Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 69, 88-89).