(FORTUNE Magazine) – Sales manager Brent Wade, 32, has written a novel about a black executive named Billy Covington who becomes so distraught over office politics and racial slights at work that he attempts suicide. Wade wrote Company Man (Algonquin Books, $18.95) in the first person but insists, ''I am not Billy.'' Like his hero, however, Wade was the first in his family to work for a big corporation. Raised by his schoolteacher mother after her divorce from a steelworker, he earned a degree in English at the University of Maryland. He worked at Westinghouse and LSI Logic before joining AT&T in 1989. Wade says he wrote the book to ''exorcise some demons of my own'' on being black in corporate America. ''A culture of conformity can be frustrating and daunting for everybody,'' he says, ''but there's another dimension to this frustration in being one of a few blacks in such organizations.'' He believes the fact that few whites grow up with black friends and therefore see them ''as a part of this vaguely threatening group'' was a factor in the Rodney King verdict. Wade says the riots that followed were ''senseless and crazy'' but not surprising. ''I have options and choices,'' he points out, ''but there are people who don't.'' Critics like the book, which has sold 15,000 copies -- not bad for a first novel. Co-workers of all colors sent Wade electronic fan mail. But so far, ''I haven't gotten a call from ((AT&T Chief Executive)) Bob Allen.'' Wade, his accountant wife, Yvette, 35, and their two sons, Wesley, 9, and Clay, 2 months, live in a house that stands on property near Baltimore that his maternal great-great-grandfather, William C. Dotson, a runaway slave, bought in 1865. Billy Covington, by the way, finds some inner peace by the end of the book. And Wade is writing a second novel.