Reading Order
Middle Passage Reading Order
Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) is the National Book Award-winning novel narrated by Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave who stows away on a slave ship called the Republic in 1830, not knowing the ship is headed for West Africa to collect members of the Allmuseri tribe. A novel of ideas in the tradition of Moby-Dick — philosophical, comic, and violent — it confronts the history of the Middle Passage through one man's journey from self-centeredness toward something larger. Johnson is a philosopher as well as a novelist, and the book's moral seriousness is matched by its formal ambition.
Where to start
Middle Passage
Complete Middle Passage Book List
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Middle Passage
Charles Johnson·1990·Start here — the complete standalone novel; the National Book Award winner.
Middle Passage — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Middle Passage a historical novel?
Middle Passage is historical fiction set in 1830, narrated by Rutherford Calhoun in the voice and style of nineteenth-century adventure novels — Robinson Crusoe, Moby-Dick — while being unmistakably a twentieth-century novel of ideas about race, freedom, colonialism, and identity. Johnson has written and spoken extensively about his philosophical influences, particularly phenomenology and Buddhism, which inform the novel's engagement with what it means to be a self and how one becomes free.
What should I read next after Middle Passage?
Johnson's other novels include Oxherding Tale (1982), a philosophical slave narrative that also draws on Eastern philosophy, and Dreamer (1998), about a Martin Luther King Jr. double. For readers who loved Middle Passage's philosophical engagement with race and history, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Roots by Alex Haley are strong companions.
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