The autobiography of an ex-colored man

"First published anonymously in 1912, James Weldon Johnson's extraordinary first book narrates the inner struggle of a gifted, light-skinned black man living on the razor's edge of the color line in Jim Crow America. The novel's pioneering realism led many early readers to take it for an actual memoir and to challenge its veracity and authorship. Republished in 1927 under Johnson's name, the book became a major inspiration for the Harlem Renaissance and one of the landmark classics of African American literature."--.