Charles Johnson

Abstract

Charles Richard Johnson (b. 1948) was born in Evanston, Illinois. He demonstrated a talent for drawing at an early age and later established his first reputation as a cartoonist, both in college and on PBS. His first two book-length publications were cartoon collections in which he engaged the assumptions of the black arts movement. He majored in journalism at Southern Illinois University, where he also worked with the novelist John Gardner. Under Gardner’s influence, he wrote six novels that were not published. He then earned a master’s degree in philosophy while continuing his work with Gardner. He went on to a PhD program in philosophy and aesthetics at SUNY–Stony Brook. He joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1976, where he remained his entire career. Though his early writing did not earn him much of a popular or critical reputation, it did establish certain concepts that have remained consistent throughout his career. His first published fiction was Faith and the Good Thing, a novel that linked philosophy, black folklore, surrealism, and realism in taking its female protagonist from the rural South to the streets of Chicago and back again. In his second novel, Oxherding Tale, he added Buddhism to the mix in the creation of the first of his neo-slave narratives; it is based on the oxherding tales of Zen Buddhist writing and painting. A high point in his career was reached with Middle Passage in 1990, which won the National Book Award. For this work, he conducted research on sea narratives, going back to ancient times. He joins this tradition with the slave narrative and philosophy, as the protagonist voluntarily joins the crew of a slave ship on its journey to and from Africa, where they take captive members of an African tribe that lacks Western perspectives on identity and material reality. His fourth novel, Dreamer, applies these concerns to a story of the end of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Johnson creates a double who trained as a Buddhist monk but has become cynical in part because of his war experiences. Johnson’s interests in spirituality, race, and philosophy are also reflected in his three volumes of short fiction, his documentary work Africans in America, his work as an editor, and his collection of photographs of King. These same topics have also limited his audience because his attention to ideas does not make him an easy fit in the marketing of African American literature. Despite these limitations, he has received a MacArthur Award, and his work has been translated into several languages.