The autobiography of an ex-coloured man

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard and double consciousness-that ruled the lives of black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Car Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-0Coloured Man became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture; the first person novel ever written by a black, it became an eloquent model for later novelist ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.