Charles R. Johnson - Life

Life

Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as a political cartoonist, at which time he was also involved in radical politics. In 1965 Charles gave lectures on 'Raacism, Caste and Class in American Society' for the newly founded Free University of New York. In 1970, he published a collection of cartoons, and this led to a television series about cartooning on PBS. He received his B.S. and M.A. from Southern Illinois University in 1971 and 1973 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from SUNY-Stony Brook in 1988.

Johnson's first novel, Faith and the Good Thing was published in 1974. In 1976, he was hired to teach at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. In 1977, he became a Buddhist; Turning the Wheel (2003) is a collection of essays about his experiences as an African-American Buddhist.

Johnson's mentor, early in his writing career, was the novelist John Gardner. In an interview, Johnson wrote, of Gardner:

"Gardner, as I’ve said often, was the hardest-working writer I’ve ever known in my life. “Writing is the only religion I have,” he once said, and this was true. He was prolific, innovative, learned (a scholar of medieval literature ), radically independent, a translator who said he knew twelve languages, a poet, librettist, novelist, short story writer, a composer of scripts for radio and films, a critic and literary scholar, player of the French horn: a true cornucopia of creativity. He could write for 72-hour stretches without sleep. But, no, he was not a gifted storyteller, as he would have admitted. His most enduring novel is Grendel, which is, of course, derived from the story we receive from the Beowulf poet. But he was an American philosophical writer, like Saul Bellow."

Recently retired, Johnson was the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington.