James Weldon Johnson: A Portrait of the Artist as a Race Man covers the literary career of one of the seminal figures of modern African American literature. It tells of Johnson's ambition to become one of the first great African American writers while serving as an American diplomat then a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It charts a literary career marked by setbacks and second chances, beginning with his initiation into the world of urbane, Black vernacular entertainment as a popular Broadway songwriter. Johnson's eventual success as an author, it shows, owed much to the way he hitched his individual literary ambition to the collective project of building a world-class African American literature, with the two neatly aligning during the Harlem Renaissance he helped launch. Though he aspired above all to be a poet, he gained his reputation mainly as a critic, anthologist, and cultural historian. Now remembered primarily for his single novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Johnson was better known in his lifetime for his later achievements, the poetry sequence God's Trombones and the epic "story of Negro life" he wrote as the complementary books Black Manhattan and his autobiography Along This Way. Arguing for a better appreciation of Johnson's poetry as well as his late prose works, this book tells the compelling story of how the man who wanted to be "the first great poet that the race has produced in America" found consolation in his last years as the "Dean" of African American letters, justly recognized for his outsized role in promoting and transmitting modern African American literature.