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Johnson, Charles Richard
3 articles on Johnson, Charles Richard
Johnson, Charles Richard
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 4361948–
African American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work challenges the concepts of time, history, language, and truth. Charles Richard Johnson was born in Evanston, Illinois. By the time he finished his undergraduate degree at Southern Illinois University, he had already published two collections of drawings, and had worked on an art program on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) called Charley's Pad. Johnson stayed on to do graduate work at the university and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the State University of New York-Stonybrook.Johnson's influences are many and varied, ranging from Japanese Buddhism to Cervantes, and from Saint Augustine to Herman Hesse. But his primary mentors have been African American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1261 Includes: Further Reading(23 April 1948– ), writer and educator, was born in Community Hospital, an all-black facility in Evanston, Illinois. He was the only child of Ruby Elizabeth and Benny Lee Johnson. While his father labored at a number of jobs to support his family (construction work, handyman, night watchman), his mother doted on their son by giving him books and sketchpads. Although Benny Johnson expressed occasional skepticism about his son's love for literature and drawing, Ruby Johnson encouraged his dream of becoming an artist.Johnson excelled in academics while attending the nationally ranked and racially integrated Evanston Township High School. In addition to his schoolwork, he set for himself the goal of reading a minimum of one book a week. Furthermore, he began a two-year correspondence course in drawing with Lawrence Lariar, an influential cartoonist who edited the annual series ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1236(b. 1948), novelist, essayist, critic, philosopher, illustrator, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Charles Richard Johnson first manifested his creativity in the graphic arts, which he parlayed into a job as an editorial cartoonist and then into two collections of drawings—Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972)—and a drawing program on PBS (Charley's Pad, 1971) before finishing his undergraduate degree at Southern Illinois University, at Carbondale. Having found success with visual art, Johnson turned to fiction, writing six apprentice novels that remain unpublished and that he describes in Being and Race (1988) as influenced by James Baldwin and John A. Williams. In 1973, while doing graduate work in philosophy at Southern Illinois University Johnson studied with ...
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