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192 Charles Johnson Charles Johnson is the author of five novels and two collections of short stories . Born in Evanston, Illinois, he received his BA and MA from Southern Illinois University and did postgraduate work at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In addition to writing fiction, Johnson writes screenplays , reviews, essays, and critical articles. His honors include the National Book Award and the Washington State Governor’s Award for Literature; his short fiction is included in the O. Henry Prize Stories (1993), Best American Short Stories (1992), and Best American Short Stories of the Eighties. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1998. Currently, Johnson holds an endowed chair, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollack Professorship for Excellence in English, at the University of Washington, where he teaches fiction. He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife. Faith and the Good Thing, 1974; Oxherding Tale, 1982; The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1986; Middle Passage, 1990; Dreamer, 1998; Soulcatcher and Other Stories, 2005; Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories, 2005 Middle Passage has been compared to the work of Melville. What made you decide to shape this material as a kind of adventure story that is reminiscent of early American literature? How did the novel gather in your mind? Middle Passage was actually a work of seventeen years. In 1971, when I was an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, I took a black history course and asked the professor if I could devote my research paper to the slave trade because I hoped to write a novel on that subject. He agreed, and I wrote that first draft of the novel that year, telling the story from the viewpoint of a white ship’s captain and in the form of a ship’s log. I decided that approach was unsuccessful, because the ship’s captain was unable to understand or empathize deeply with the slaves in the hold of his ship. So I put that draft away and worked on other projects, though I charles Johnson 193 continued to gather material on the slave trade until 1983, when I again returned to the book, this time with the intention that it should be, first and foremost, a rousing high-seas-adventure tale—one that delivered more details on the daily life of Africans on those ships than any other novel. What kind of research did you do for the book? Were there ways in which the discoveries of research shaped the plot and/or characters as you wrote the novel? As I mentioned, seventeen years of historical research went into the novel. What I didn’t have in 1983 was knowledge of the sea and its lore. So, during the six years I worked on Middle Passage, I read all of the sea novels of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London. I went through the Sinbad stories and read nautical dictionaries—that, in order to immerse myself in the language of the maritime tradition. I even had a friend of mine who is an accomplished maker of miniature ships build for me a replica of an eighteenth-century slave ship, one that had twenty feet of rigging by the time he finished it. Knowing the world of sailors and ships naturally helped define (and expand) the parameters and possibilities for what the characters in Middle Passage could and would do. What were the pleasures and perils of research for you? Research held no perils for me, only pleasures. As a scholar of literature, and a PhD in philosophy, I’ve lived a large part of my life in libraries, digging through dry texts for those generally unnoticed nuggets of history and thought that lend themselves to drama and new discoveries. What was the greatest challenge in writing a historical novel? Actually, I’ve never seen myself as a “historical writer.” My novels and stories that are set in the past are, at bottom, philosophical fictions, but in order to explore certain ideas it was necessary to set those works in a time other than our own. How did Rutherford Calhoun first appear to you as a character? How was the complexity of his character revealed during the process of writing the novel? In what ways did he surprise you? Rutherford Calhoun first entered my imagination as a free man, not a slave, a young man who is something of a rogue yet equipped with all the knowledge of a nineteenth-century intellectual, thanks to...

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