Charles Perry (author)
Charles Perry (1924–1969) was an African American author whose only published novel was "Portrait of a Young Man Drowning". He was born in Savannah, Georgia, 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. An 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, while living with an overbearing mother. The novel was considered ground-breaking when it was first published 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 death of his 11-year-old son, who died falling from a tree onto a rod iron fence. Charles Jr., entitled "I Wake Up Screaming". He died of  cancer. "Portrait of a Young man Drowning" was made into a film entitled Six Ways to Sunday in 1997. As well as writing Perry also appeared in over 30 films mainly in minor roles.