conventions with a rich psychological complexity
that would influence later authors such as WALTER
WHITE, JESSIE FAUSET, and NELLA LARSEN. Johnson’s
protagonist is the first major fictive representation
of W. E. B. DUBOIS’s concept of double conscious-
ness, and this nameless searching soul would serve
as a prototype of sorts for RALPH ELLISON’s protag-
onist in INVISIBLE MAN (1952).
In the end, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man’s complex blend of styles—picaresque, psy-
chological realism, social protest, and autobiogra-
phy—speaks to Johnson’s artistry. More than any
other aspect of the work, however, the narrator’s
characterization gives the novel its power. A highly
ironic character, he describes his reason for tell-
ing his story as a “savage and diabolical desire to
gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn
them into a practical joke on society” (778). De-
spite his attempts to maintain this detached ironic
distance from his story, his inability to live com-
fortably with his decisions marks him, instead, as
the object of the author’s irony. The protagonist’s
inability to control fully his own narrative mirrors
the numerous contradictions in his personality. He
is alternately a man of astonishing brilliance and
absurd naiveté, of strong voice and weak will, of
determination and vacillation, of racial commit-
ment and racial renunciation. The last of these
contradictions, in particular, has led some readers
to take issue with the novel and even mistake John-
son for his narrator, but it is this rich ambiguity of
characterization and range of possible interpreta-
tions that has engaged new generations of read-
ers and assured the novel a place of prominence in
American literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fleming, Robert E. James Weldon Johnson. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Greene, J. Lee. Blacks in Eden: The African American
Novel’s First Century. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1996.
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Man. In The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, 777–861. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1997.
Price, Kenneth M., and Lawrence J. Oliver, eds. Criti-
cal Essays on James Weldon Johnson. Critical Es-
says on American Literature. New York: G. K. Hall,
1997.
Andrew B. LeiterAutobiography of Malcolm X, The
Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex
Haley (1965)
In this classic autobiography, MALCOLM X chron-
icles a life that epitomizes in every way LANGSTON
HUGHES’s speaker in “Mother to Son,” who de-
clares at the beginning of the poem, “Life for me
ain’t been no crystal stairs.” Malcolm titles the first
chapter of his autobiography “Nightmare,” and
he describes his “earliest vivid memory” as the
“nightmare night in 1929” when he was “suddenly
snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pis-
tol shots and shouting and smoke and flames....
Our home was burning down around us. We were
lunging and bumping and tumbling all over each
other trying to escape” (3). Like RICHARD WRIGHT
in BLACK BOY, Malcolm in the Autobiography bears
witness to the atrocities and destructiveness of
American racism, particularly to young African-
American males growing up in a Jim Crow–domi-
nated America. In the Autobiography, Malcolm
revisits his lived experiences, dividing them into
three distinct stages, which are clearly demarcated
by the personal transformation, metamorphosis,
and accompanying name changes he undergoes as
he moves from a life as almost orphaned to life as
a street hustler to a spiritual life shaped by Islamic
teachings and beliefs.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925,
to Reverend Earl and Louise Little, Malcolm, one
of eight children, became (in part because of his
light skin) the dearly beloved child of his father, an
itinerant minister and leader-organizer for MAR-
CUS GARVEY’s “Back to Africa” Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) movement in
Lansing, Michigan. Reverend Little’s involvement
with what many “good Christian white people”
(1)—including members of the Black Legionnaires
and Ku Klux Klan—considered a troublemaking,22 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The