Middle Passage - Hardcover

Johnson, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501110527 ISBN 13: 9781501110528

Publisher: Scribner, 2015

Synopsis

A Scribner Classics edition of Charles Johnson’s masterpiece, winner of the National Book Award—“a novel in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby-Dick...heroic in proportion...fiction that hooks the mind” (The New York Times Book Review).

It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a daring voyage of horror and self-discovery.

Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative, and philosophical novel.

About this title

Review:

In this savage parable of the African American experience, Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave eking out a living in New Orleans in 1830, hops aboard a square rigger to evade the prim Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him. But the Republic turns out to be a slave clipper bound for Africa. Calhoun, whose master educated him as a humanist, becomes the captain's cabin boy, and though he hates himself for acting as a lackey, he's able to help the African slaves recently taken aboard to stage a revolt before the rowdy, drunken crew can spring a mutiny. Middle Passage won the 1990 National Book Award.

About the Author:

Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King’s Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1501110527
• ISBN 13: 9781501110528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224