Recommendations
Books Like Middle Passage
Best books to read after Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson's Middle Passage is the National Book Award-winning novel of a freed slave on a slave ship in 1830 — a novel of ideas in the tradition of Moby-Dick. These recommendations continue the Johnson canon, explore the African American historical novel tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the philosophical novel that uses the history of slavery to examine what it means to be free.
- 1Buy
Oxherding Tale
by Charles Johnson
The companion Johnson novel — an earlier philosophical slave narrative drawing on Eastern philosophy and the picaresque tradition, showing the same formal ambition as Middle Passage in a different register; essential for readers who want more Johnson.
- 2Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
The Pulitzer Prize-winning companion — Sethe and the ghost of her daughter in post-Civil War Ohio; Morrison's most celebrated novel confronting the psychological aftermath of slavery with the same moral seriousness as Middle Passage, through a completely different formal approach.
- 3Buy
The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
The Pulitzer Prize winner on Black slaveholders — Henry Townsend, a free Black man who owned slaves in antebellum Virginia; Jones's novel sharing Middle Passage's interest in the moral complexities of freedom within an enslaved society.
- 4Buy
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
The companion Morrison in Black male interiority — Milkman Dead's journey northward and his discovery of his family's history, the National Book Award winner sharing Middle Passage's interest in what freedom means for a Black man in America and how ancestry shapes identity.
- 5Buy
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville
The formal predecessor that Middle Passage is explicitly in dialogue with — Ishmael, Ahab, and the white whale, Melville's novel-of-ideas on a ship as the container for an America of multiple races and philosophies; reading Middle Passage against Moby-Dick shows exactly what Johnson is doing.
- 6Buy
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The Pulitzer Prize-winning companion in the slave narrative tradition — Cora's escape from a Georgia plantation on a literal underground railroad, Whitehead's formally inventive engagement with the history of slavery sharing Middle Passage's commitment to making the history strange and new.
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
The time-travel slave narrative companion — a Black woman writer in 1970s Los Angeles pulled back to antebellum Maryland, Butler's most celebrated novel using science fiction to make the reader feel the reality of slavery with the same urgency that Johnson achieves through the philosophical adventure novel.
- 8Buy
Roots
by Alex Haley
The epic African American historical narrative companion — Kunta Kinte captured in Gambia in 1767 and his descendants through to Haley himself, the multigenerational saga that established the modern template for African American historical fiction that Middle Passage operates in and revises.
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