Charles Nelson

Charles Nelson (1942 - 2003) was an American writer, best known for his 1981 novel The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up.

Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he moved to DeLand, Florida with his family at age 12 He served as a medic in the United States Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.

He published The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up in 1981. Both novels took their titles from the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud; and died there in 2003. Despite writing about a gay protagonist partially based on his own experiences in Vietnam, none of the known biographical sources about Nelson clarify whether he ever personally identified himself as gay.

The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up is the subject of an essay by Jim Marks in the 2010 non-fiction anthology The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.