Charles R. Johnson

Charles R. Johnson (born 1948 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American scholar and author of novels, short stories, and essays. Johnson, an African-American, has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Middle Passage and Dreamer.

Johnson first came to prominence in the 1960s as a political cartoonist, at which time he was also involved in radical politics. In 1970, he published a collection of cartoons, and this led to a television series about cartooning on PBS. Johnson's first novel, Faith and the Good Thing was published in 1974. In 1990, he was awarded the National Book Award for Middle Passage.

Johnson received his B.S. and M.A. from Southern Illinois University in 1971 and 1973, respectively; he got his Ph.D. in philosophy from SUNY-Stony Brook in 1988.

Johnson is currently the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington, and is a MacArthur Fellow. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2003 he published Turning the Wheel, a collections of essays about his experiences as an African-American Buddhist.

Controversy

In the updated 1995 introduction to his novel Oxherding Tale, Johnson engendered a political firestorm when he seemed to criticize Alice Walker's The Color Purple for its negative portrayal of African-American males. Quoth Johnson: "I leave it to readers to decide which book pushes harder at the boundaries of convention, and inhabits most confidently the space where fiction and philosophy meet." Such candor and criticism came as a shock to some in academia, who felt Johnson violated an unspoken taboo against criticizing another writer of color.

Books

• Faith and the Good Thing (1974, ISBN 0-7432-1254-1)
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (1982, ISBN 0-452-27237-8)
• Oxherding Tale (1982, ISBN 0-253-16607-1)
• Being and Race (1988, ISBN 0-253-31165-9)
• Middle Passage (1990, ISBN 0-684-85588-7)
• Dreamer: A Novel (1998, ISBN 0-684-85443-0)
• Turning the Wheel (2003, ISBN 0-7432-4324-2)

Reviews and Reactions

• Review of Dreamer at Pretty Fakes

External links

• http://www.oxherdingtale.com/
• http://depts.washington.edu/engl/people/profile.php?id=32