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Born
February 5, 1933 in London, England; died by his own hand, November 13,
1973; son of Stanley Wilfred and Emily Jane Johnson; married Virginia
Ann Kimpton; children: two.
EDUCATION: King's College, London, B.A. (with Honours in English), 1959.
CAREER: Writer, film and television director and producer. Member of Writer's Guild, Equity, Society of Authors.
AWARDS HONOURS:Gregory Awards for Travelling People and Poems; Somerset Maugham Award, 1967 for Trawl; Grand Prix, Tours International Short Film Festival, and Melbourne International Short Film Festival, 1968 forYou're Human Like the Rest of Them; First gregynog Arts Fellow, University of Wales, 1970
SIDELIGHTS:B.S.
Johnson, generally regarded as an experimental writer, utilised his art
to probe the structure of the novel by creating new forms of prose and
by manipulating the basic conventions of the medium to suit his own
avant-garde vision. "For ten years," wrote Robert S. Ryf in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction,
"in seven novels, and a number of short pieces, Johnson single-mindedly
and belligerently pushed at the frontiers of the novel and prowled the
shifting and nebulous borders between fiction and fact. He was
centrally concerned with the relationships of the writer to his
material as well as to his readers."
Called a "caricature
... of the classical novelist ... who sees through the fiction game and
its weary conventions" by D.Keith Mano in the New York Times Book Review,
Johnson believed the traditional form of the novel was outdated and the
structure of the modern novel had to be extended to reflect modern
man's expanded perception of reality. A critic for the Times Literary Supplement
asserted that Johnson was "against narrative, against fiction of all
kinds, against novels which require effort to appreciate and balefully
serious about his conception fo the way his medium should develop."
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