Johnson, Lemuel Adolphus

A Sierra Leonian, Johnson was a poet, literary critic, and professor. He was born in Maiduguri, Nigeria on December 15, 1941. He was educated at Oberlin College and Penn State University. In 1969 he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. He taught English at Forah Bay College of the University of Sierra Leone from 1970-1974. In 1974 he returned to the University of Michigan as an associate professor in the Dept. of English Language and Literature. He was promoted to full professor in 1980. Johnson authored a three volume work of poetry entitled the Sierra Leone Trilogy (1995). The individual titles are High Life for Caliban (1974), Hand on the Naval (1978), and Carnival of the Old Coast (1984). An expert in African literature and the African Diaspora, Johnson also published several works of literary criticism including The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon: Western Literature and the Idea of Blackness in Human Form (1970) and Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues): Import and the Appropriation of Culture (1998). Johnson died on March 12, 2002.