Charles Richard Johnson

American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and cartoonist.  Johnson, whose balance of philosophy and folklore has been praised since the publication of his first novel in 1974, gained prominence when his novel Middle Passage (1990) won the National Book Award in 1990.   Like his other works of fiction, Middle Passage embodies Johnson's controversial version of black literature, defined in his Being and Race:  Black Writing since 1970 (1988) as "a fiction of increasing artistic and intellectual growth, one that enables us as a people-as a culture-to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration."

Biography excerpt from:
James P. Draper, Editor of Black Literature Criticism, and Gale Research Inc
http://www.gale.com/. Copyright 1

992 by Gale Research Inc.  Posted (reprinted) by permission of Gale Research Inc.

Charles Johnson LIVE!
http://www.ethelbert-miller.blogspot.com/

The E-Channel presents the words and wisdom of the writer Charles Johnson. It's Charles Johnson LIVE ! It was created by E. Ethelbert Miller in January 2011. It's a one year project in which Miller will interview Johnson about his books, beliefs, and various matters of the heart and mind. The E-Channel presents Johnson's own voice. Every word is his. They are responses to questions asked each week by Miller.

“I think together we two brothers---black men in America---created something unprecedented in literary culture, something others might be inspired by and seek to imitate or build upon. This year-long project really IS something never done before, never even conceived of before (in the past or present), and I know how much work you invested in it.” —Charles Johnson

I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson
Click to order via Amazon

Rudolph P. Byrd (Editor)

Hardcover: 398 pages
Publisher: Indiana University Press; First Edition edition (April 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0253335418
ISBN-13: 978-0253335418
Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches

Charles Johnson is one of the most talented artists currently working in America. All of his novels have been widely praised and read. Middle Passage won the National Book Award and established Johnson in the tradition of Ralph Ellison, one of his idols. In 1998 he was the recipient of one of the prestigious MacArthur "Genius" awards.

Though best known for his fiction, Johnson is also an accomplished essayist, reviewer, scriptwriter, and cartoonist. This collection gathers together a rich sampling of his work, including stories, speeches, cartoons, and interviews. A final section contains scholarly commentary by leading academic writers. I Call Myself an Artist provides a fascinating overview of the life work of one of America's most important creative minds.

Faith and the Good Thing
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Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Scribner; annotated edition edition (January 10, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743212509
ISBN-13: 978-0743212502
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches

Johnson's debut novel

Charles Johnson, the National Book Award-winning author of the bestselling Middle Passage, published his stunning first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, in 1974. At its release, Black World called it "one of the great American novels of this century...unqualifiedly good and extraordinarily beautiful."

Faith and the Good Thing is the haunting fable of Faith Cross, a black Southern girl whose quest for the good in life comes to represent our shared human adventure from innocence to identity. Faith is told by her dying mother, "Girl, you get yourself a good thing," although she has no idea what that is. As we follow her journey from the traditional Southern Baptist world of her mother's funeral to a swamp witch's lair to a life of prostitution and loveless marriage in Chicago, we relive the history of twentieth-century black America, annotated with philosophic insight into the nature of identity, justice, and our common place in the universe along the way.

Told in the style of black folklore and replete with voodoo werewitches, hypocritical Pentecostal preachers, wise street bums, and philosophy from the ancient Nubian lore to Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Faith and the Good Thing burgeons with riches. Like Voltaire's Candide with a touch of de Sade's Justine, or the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Johnson's Faith is an innocent who searches through the horrors of this world to terrible knowledge and vital understanding.

Publishers Weekly hailed this novel as "so original, so imaginative, and so exciting in what it has to say about the black woman's experience in America that it is a reading experience unlike anything else in a long time." It will dazzle Johnson's new and loyal fans who are discovering his early work for the first time.

 

Soulcatcher And Other Stories

 

Oxherding Tale

Format: Paperback,176pp.
ISBN: 0452275032
Publisher: Dutton/Plume Pub. Date: August 1995
Edition Desc: REPRINT

One night in the antebellum South, a slaveowner and his African-American butler stay up to all hours drinking Madeira and playing cards. Finally, too besotted to face their respective wives, they drunkenly decide to switch places in each other's beds. The result is a hilarious imbroglio and an offspring, Andrew Hawkins, whose life becomes the Oxherding Tale, a deliciously funny, bitterly ironic account of slavery, racism, oppression - and the African-American spirit - in the Old South. Through sexual escapades, picaresque adventures, and philosophical inquiry, young Hawkins walks the line between white and black worlds and comments wryly on marriage, human nature, slave catchers, and culture along the way.

Magnificent, and like everything Charles Johnson does, deep and funny. As a writer, he goes places few of us dare to go. He's one of the most gifted writers I've read and is an inspiration to all writers. — James McBride

Initially conceived as an exploration of "the plight of the black male in the United States," Black Men Speaking is that and more. It gives expression to a range of issues - cultural, economic, psychological, religious, and personal - as seen by a remarkable group of black men - novelists, a well-known artist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a doctor, an editor, an academic, a famous musician, and a group of ordinary citizens from Harlem. Powerful voices give us powerful images and powerful messages.