SOURCE: Zawacki, Andrew. “The Philosopher King.” Financial Times (26 September 1998): 8.

In the following review of Dreamer, Zawacki notes the importance that Johnson places on Martin Luther King Jr.'s role as a moral philosopher.

Novelist Charles Johnson is best known as the only African American since Ralph Ellison to win the National Book Award. Thirty-eight years after the publication of Ellison's Invisible Man in 1952, Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) earned its author high praise from critics considering him an heir to Melville, Conrad and Swift as well as to Wright and Cleaver.

The civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King Jr is the focus of Dreamer, Johnson's new novel, which is published next week in the UK. Set in Chicago during the last two years of King's life, Dreamer is a fictional account of King's encounter with his almost identical “double,” Chaym Smith.

Johnson's preparation for the novel was intense: he...