A Charles Johnson Bibliography

Works by Charles Johnson
Works About Charles Johnson
Interviews with Charles Johnson

Works by Charles Johnson

Books

Black Humor. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1970. Half-Past Nation-Time. Westlake Village, A: Aware Press, 1972. Faith and the Good Thing. New York: Viking Press, 1974. Oxherding Tale. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. New York: Atheneum, 1986. Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Black Men Speaking. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. (co-edited with John McCluskey, Jr.) Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. San Diego: Harcourt Press, 1998. (co-written with Patricia Smith) Dreamer. New York: Scribner, 1998. Soulcatcher and Other Stories. San Diego: Harcourt Press, 1998. King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Viking Press, 2000. (co-written with Bob Adelman) Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Selected Essays, Teleplays, and Stories

“Creating the Political Cartoon.” Scholastic Editor Feb. 1973: 8-13. “Essays on Fiction.” Intro 10. Hendel and Reinke, Publishers, 1979. 10-13. “Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet.” American Visions June 1988: 36+. “One Meaning of Mo’ Better Blues.” Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1991. 117-24. “The Philosopher and the American Novel.” California State Library Foundation Bulletin 35 (April 1991): 1-16. “Java Journey: From Chaos to Serenity.” The New York Times 7 Mar. 1993, sec. Sophisticated Traveler: 24+. “Absence of Black Middle-Class Images Has Global Impact.” National Minority Politics 4 (Nov. 1993): 7+. “The Work of the World.” Transforming Vision: Writers on Art. Ed. Edward Hirsch. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1994. 100-04. “The Gift of the Osuo.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 519-26. “Green Belt.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 559-78. “John Gardner as Mentor.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 619-24. “Executive Decision.” Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America. Eds. Susan Richards Shreve and Porter Shreve. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 93- 105. “Fictionalizing King.” http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/legacy/Johnson_intro.html. “Creative Adventures: The Fiction Writer’s Apprenticeship.” Creating Fiction. Ed. Julie Checkoway. Cincinnati: Story Press, 1999. 34-42. “A Soul’s Jagged Arc.” The New York Times 3 Jan. 1999, sec. Magazine: 10. “An Ever-Lifting Song of Black America.” The New York Times 14 Feb. 1999, sec. Arts & Leisure: 1+. “Accepting the Challenge.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 10.1 (Fall 2000): 63-64. “Sweet Dreams.” StoryQuarterly 36 (2000): 111-16. “Fred Barzyk: PBS’ Golden Age Pioneer.” Fred Barzyk: The Search for a Persona Vision in Broadcast Television. Milwaukee: Marquette University, 2001. “Cultural Relatively.” Indiana Review 24 (Spring 2002): 100-03.

Works about Charles Johnson

Books

Little, Jonathan. Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Byrd, Rudolph P., ed. I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. Cox, Timothy J. Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier To Charles Johnson. New York: Garland Publishing, 2001. Nash, William R. Charles Johnson’s Fiction. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Essays and Book Chapters

Kutzinski, Vera. “Johnson Revises Johnson: Oxherding Tale and The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man.” Pacific Coast Philology 23.1 (1988): 39-46. Crouch, Stanley. “Charles Johnson: Free at Last!” Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays And Reviews, 1979-1989. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 136-43. Hayward, Jennifer. “Something to Serve: Constructs of the Feminine in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.” Black American Literature Forum 25.4 (Winter 1991): 689-703. Gleason, William. “The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale. Black American Literature Forum 25.4 (Winter 1991): 705-28. Little, Jonathan. “Charles Johnson’s Revolutionary Oxherding Tale.” Studies in American Fiction 19 (1991): 141-51. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and The Subject of the Narrative of Slavery.” African American Review 26 (1992): 373-94. Benesch, Klaus. “The Education of Mingo.” The African American Short Story, 1970 To 1990. Ed. Wolfgang Karrer and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher, 1993. 169-79. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “The Properties of Desire: Forms of Slave Identity in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” Arizona Quarterly 50.2 (1994): 73-108. Travis, Molly Abel. “Beloved and Middle Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critic’s Essentialism.” Narrative 2.3 (1994): 179-200. Byrd, Rudolph P. “Oxherding Tale and Sidhartha: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Emergence of a Hidden Tradition.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 549-58 Coleman, James W. “Charles Johnson’s Quest for Black Freedom in Oxherding Tale.” African American Review 29.4 (1995): 631-44. Goudie, S. X. “’Leavin’ a Mark on the Wor(l)d’: Marksmen and Marked Men in Middle Passage.” African American Review 29.1 (1995): 109-22. Scott, Daniel M., III. “Interrogating Identity: Appropriation and Transformation in Middle Passage.” African American Review 29.4 (1995): 645-55. Walby, Celestin. “The African Sacrificial Kingship Ritual and Johnson’s Middle Passage.” African American Review 29.4 (1995): 657-69. Fagel, Brian. “Passages from the Middle: Coloniality and Postcoloniality in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 625-34. Griffiths, Frederick T. “’Sorcery is Dialectical’: Plato and Jean Toomer in Charles Johnson’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 527-38. Jablon, Madelyn. “Mimesis of Process: The Thematization of Art: Charles Johnson, Middle Passage.” Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. 29-54. Little, Jonathan. “From the Comic Book to the Comic: Charles Johnson’s Variations On Creative Expression.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 579-600. Muther, Elizabeth. “Isadora at Sea: Misogyny as Comic Capital in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 649-58. O’Keefe, Vincent A. “Reading Rigor Mortis: Offstage Violence and Excluded Middles ‘in’ Johnson’s Middle Passage and Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 635-646 Smith, Virginia Watley. “Sorcery, Double-Consciousness, and Warring Souls: An Intertextual Reading of Middle Passage and Captain Blackman.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 659-74. Storhoff, Gary. “The Artist as Universal Mind: Berkeley’s Influence on Charles Johnson.” African American Review 30.4 (1996): 539-48. Spaulding, A. T. “Finding the Way: Karl Marx and the Transcendence of Discourse in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale.” Sycamore: A Journal of American Culture. 1.1 (1997). Thaden, Barbara Z. “Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage as Historiographic Metafiction.” College English 59.7 (Nov. 1997): 753-66. Hardack, Richard. “Black Skin, White Tissues: Local Color and Universal Solvents in The Novels of Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 22.4 (Fall 1999): 1028-53. Page, Philip. “’As Within, so It Is Without’: The Composite Self in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage.” Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. 116- 56. Retman, Sonnet. “’Nothing Was Lost in the Masquerade’: The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.” African American Review 33.3 (Fall 1999): 417-37. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Serving the Form, Conserving the Order: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 167-200. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Revising the Form, Misserving the Order: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 201-26. Nash, William R. “’I Was My Father’s Father, and He My Child’: The Process of Black Fatherhood and Literary Evolution in Charles Johnson’s Fiction.” Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama. Ed. Keith Clark. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 108-34. Selzer, Linda Furgerson. “Charles Johnson’s ‘Exchange Value’: Signifyin(g) on Marx.” The Massachusetts Review 42.2 (Summer 2001): 253-68. Whalen-Bridge, John. “Waking Cain: The Poetics of Integration in Charles Johnson’s Dreamer.” Callaloo 26.2 (2003): 504-521. Selzer, Linda. “Master-Slave Dialectics in Charles Johnson’s ‘The Education of Mingo.’” African American Review 37 (2003): 105-14.

Interviews with Charles Johnson

Newton, Edmund. “Sailing Against a Literary Tide.” Los Angeles Times 20 August 1990.

Williams, Marjorie. “The Author’s Solo Passage.” Washington Post 4 Dec. 1990, Sec. D: 1+.

Blau, Eleanor. “Charle Johnson’s Tale of Slaving, Seafaring and Philosophizing.” New York Times 2 Jan. 1991, sec. C: 9+.

Peterson, V. R. “Charles Johnson.” Essence April 1991: 36.

McFadden, Cyra. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” San Francisco Examiner 17 Nov. 1991, Sec. Image: 46-49.

Terkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. New York: New Press, 1993. 213-18.

Rowell, Charles. “An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 20.3 (1998): 531-47.

Trucks, Rob. “A Conversation with Charles Johnson.” TriQuarterly (Winter 2000): 537-60.

Levasseur, Jennifer, and Kevin Rabalais. “A Conversation with Charles Johnson.” Brick 69 (Spring 2002): 133-44.

Osen, Diane. “Charles Johnson.” The Book That Changed My Life. New York:Modern Library, 2002. 32-42.