The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Penguin Classics)

Originally published in 1912, this novel was one of the first to present a frank picture of being black in America.

Masked in the tradition of the literary confession as practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be the candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgment of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience, an African-American.

Written by the first black executive secretary of the NAACP, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in its depiction of turn-of-the-century New York, anticipates the social realism of the Harlem Renaissance writers. In its unprecedented analysis of the social causes and artistic consequences of a black man's denial of the best within himself, it is perhaps James Weldon Johnson's greatest service to his race.