Portrait of a Young Man Drowning

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Portrait of a Young Man Drowning, published in 1962, is the only novel published by Charles Perry. The novel takes place in the slums of Brooklyn during the Great Depression, and follows the narrator, Harry Odum, from his early childhood to his death. Driven by the absence of his closet homosexual father, Hap, and the alternating oppressiveness and neglect of his mother, Kate, Harold develops an Oedipal complex and an inability to sexually relate to anyone without resorting to his alter-ego, Madden. His afflictions, coupled with his impoverished upbringing, lead him to a life of crime that enables him to symbolically kill his father and copulate with his mother time after time.

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.