The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man

Ragtime music and the cakewalk flavors the episodic adventures of the nameless narrator of this classic story which takes place during the gaslight era, as his crisis of racial identity deepens. His adventures carry hi from a precocious childhood in Connecticut to painful yet eye-opening disappointment in Atlanta; on the coming-of-age experiences among colorful Cuban exiles in Florida; then north to the fast seductive and dangerous night life of New York's Tenderloin district from which he barely escapes. Later, in America's south, the awful terror of witnessing a burning at-the-stake lynching draws him across the color-line to the white world and a troubled but secure existence.