B. S. Johnson (1933 - 1973) was an English experimental novelist and film-maker.

Johnson was born into a working class family, left school at sixteen and began work as an accountant. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, and with this knowledge, managed to pass the university exam for the University of Oxford.

After he graduated, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental novels. Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) were relatively conventional, but The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and plays.

A movie of his final novel he published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) was released in 2000.

At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, paranoid and lonely, Johnson committed suicide.

Bibliography (novels)

Travelling People (1963).

Albert Angelo (1964).

Trawl (1966).

The Unfortunates (1969).

House Mother Normal (1971).

Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (1973).

See the Old Lady Decently (1975).

Selected Filmography

You're Human Like the Rest of Them (1967).

Paradigm (1969).

Unfair (1970).

Biography

Jonathan Coe. (2004) Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. Picador.

External Links

The Official B.S. Johnson Webpage (http://www.bsjohnson.co.uk/).