Political visionary, human rights leader, preacher, scholar, martyr, Martin Luther King Jr. remains one of the most fascinating and significant historical figures. Now, Charles Johnson, a National Book Award-winning novelist, uses his keen insight into the end of the King years to produce a work of historical fiction that dares to change the very nature of the genre.

Set against the racial turbulence of the Civil Rights era, Dreamer is the first work of fiction to explore King's life. Yet the story, told by Mattew Bishop, one of King's devoted followers, is also a tale of doubles, warring brothers, envy, and inequality.

The novel introduces us to Chaym Smith, a man whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. In the course of training Chaym to shield King from danger, Matthew comes to realize the philosophical magnitude of our greatest civil rights leader and the ambiguities within the Movement itself, and he—and we—are irreversibly changed. What makes one man great and the other just a mirror for greatness? What does it mean to be of African American descent in America? What does it take to change to face of a country forever?

Dreamer is a magisterial homage to the man who answered those questions for us. Readers will come away from this astonishing, mulitlayered novel with a knowledge of King, not only as a triumphant political leader, but as a father, husband, friend—and man. Dreamer is a dramatic tour de force that is personal, profound, and deeply inspiring.

Amazon.com Review
At the center of National Book Award winner Charles Johnson's novel Dreamer are three remarkable men: Martin Luther King Jr.; his aide, Matthew Bishop, an African American philosophy student; and Chaym Smith, a man who is a dead ringer for the civil rights leader. Not only does Smith resemble King, but he also shares his intellectual voracity, widely read in both Eastern and Western philosophy, proficient in Sanskrit and martial arts, and a talented painter. But where King is deeply spiritual, Smith is a cynic; where King has the full force of his strong beliefs and his strong family heritage, Smith has nothing but a lifetime of misfortune to shape his attitudes. When he offers to become King's stand-in, Johnson creates an ideal situation in which to explore issues long at the heart of the "race issue" in America: the inequality between black and white, even between black and black.

As the novel moves forward in time toward that fateful day in Memphis, Johnson concentrates on the relationship between Bishop--the narrator--and Smith, a man who, with better luck, might have been as great as King. Periodically, the author also lets us in on King's own meditations on his life and faith, and the movement to which he has given them. All in all, Dreamer is the kind of novel Charles Johnson does so well: a book about a big subject, chock full of ideas and populated by characters articulate enough to argue them.