Charles R. Larson

Charles Raymond Larson (January 14, 1938 – May 22, 2021) was an American scholar of literature, particularly of African literature. He published a number of anthologies of African literature, as well as literary criticism, and is seen as one of the founders of the study of African literature in the United States.

Biography Charles Raymond Larson was born on January 14, 1938, in Sioux City, Iowa. He attended the University of Colorado and studied English literature, receiving a BA in 1959 and an MA in 1961. He taught throughout his studies: high school in Burlington, Iowa (1959–1960) and Englewood, Colorado (1961–1962), and as an instructor at the University of Colorado (1961–1962).

In 1962, Larson joined the Peace Corps. He did not wish to fight in the Vietnam War and joined the Peace Corps to receive a draft deferment. In Nigeria he first became interested in African literature, which was then not easily available in the US. At the time, he was familiar only with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, but his experience in Nigeria was life-changing, and made him realize that his education had failed him: not only had he never been taught African literature, but he "had never read any work by a minority writer", as he later said. He was general editor for the series "Collier Af/Am Library", published by the US publishing house Collier. Between 1968 and 1972, thirty-eight books by African (but also African American and West Indian) writers were published in the series as affordable mass-market paperbacks.

Larson also edited and published "seminal" republished as Modern African Stories by Fontana in 1971), Opaque Shadows and Other Stories from Contemporary Africa (1975, reprinted as More Modern African Stories), and Under African Skies: Modern African Stories (1997). His The Emergence of African Fiction (1972) discussed African novel writers and attempted to define an African aesthetic, and his The Ordeal of the African Writer (2001) discussed various challenges that African writers had to deal with, including problems with getting published in Chevy Chase, Maryland, of prostate cancer.

Publications Academic Prejudice: Twenty Tales of Oppression and Liberation (1971) The Emergence of African Fiction (1972) The Novel in the Third World (1976) American Indian Fiction (1978) Worlds of Fiction (1993) Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen (1993) The Ordeal of the African Writer (2001)

Anthologies African Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary African Writing (1970, republished as Modern African Stories by Fontana in 1971) Opaque Shadows and Other Stories from Contemporary Africa (1975, reprinted as More Modern African Stories) Under African Skies: Modern African Stories (1997)

Fiction Academia Nuts (novel, 1977, satire ) The Insect Colony (novel, 1978, "about an entomologist ensconced in a remote village in Cameroon" ) Arthur Dimmesdale (novel, 1983, "a retelling of The Scarlet Letter focused on the guilt-wracked minister" )