Charles Perry

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This article is about the American writer. For other persons named Charles Perry, see Charles Perry (disambiguation).

Charles Perry was an African American author whose only published novel was Portrait of a Young Man Drowning. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1924, but moved to Brooklyn when he was still in grade school. During the 1940s, he was a co-star of the hit radio series New World A-Coming.

Portrait of a Young Man Drowning draws heavily on Perry's first hand research of gangsters and juvenile delinquents in his own Brooklyn neighbourhood. A homage to James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel is written in the first person and tells the story of Harold, a young man who gets sucked into Brooklyn's underworld scene, whilst trying to escape the control of his overbearing and suffocating mother. The novel was considered ground breaking when it first appeared in 1962 not least because it was one of the first novels written in the first person by a black author with a white protagonist.

Perry soon began work on a semi-autobiographical account of the mysterious real-life murder of his 11-year-old son, Charles Jr., entitled I Wake Up Screaming. In 1969 he contracted inoperable cancer, and died in the same year, when he was just forty-five.

The unfinished manuscript is believed to have been lost in a Perry family flood.