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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Written by: James Weldon Johnson
Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
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About this listen

James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than 90 years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. The first fictional memoir ever written by an African-American, 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.

Told by a bi-racial 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."

Public Domain (P)2011 AudioGo
Classics
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important novel, but not a great one

It needed a a bit of an introduction, to greater understand that this was based at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century.

Glad I had the opportunity to listen to it, even though the plot was hugely rushed at the end. It look a while to get into the stride of the narrator, still not sure why the narrator was not the best for the content.

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