James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the fictional account of the life of a young American man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With his bi-racial heritage, the Ex-Colored Man is faced with the choice of embracing his black culture and its ragtime music, or passing as a white man and living a mediocre middle-class existence. While not actually an autobiography, Johnson based the book on his own life and the lives of people he knew.