Clifton Johnson
BiographyClifton Johnson (January 25, 1865–January 22, 1940) was an American author, illustrator, and photographer. He published some 125 books in many genres including travel books, children's stories, and biographies, many with his own illustrations and photographs.
He was born in the village of Hockanum in Hadley, Massachusetts, the oldest child of Chester Lorenzo Johnson and Jeanette (née Reynolds), and had three siblings: two brothers and one sister. He attended a local, one-room schoolhouse and then the Hopkins Academy in Hadley, dropping out at age 15; after which he spent five years working at the Bridgman & Lyman bookstore in Northampton before moving to New York City to study at the Art Students League of New York. He married Anna Tweed McQueston, a local school teacher, in 1896 and went on a honeymoon (which doubled as a work trip for Clifton) to England, Scotland, Ireland, and France. The couple eventually had six children.
Even though he received little formal education, Johnson became an accomplished author, photographer, artist, editor, and folklorist. The anthropologist Carl Withers considered him a “skillful and often graceful writer, and a foremost pioneer photographer of folk life...” His first few books prompted publishers to send Johnson on trips to England, Scotland, and Ireland to take photographs for reissues of classic popular books by the likes of J. M. Barrie, Jane Barlow, Richard Jefferies and Ian Maclaren. On his second trip, in 1896, he also visited France. He returned with hundreds of photographs, drawings, and notebooks filled with impressions, and, with the exception of France, folklore he gathered from the locals. From these he produced books about each country. Clifton Johnson had an interest for everyday life of people in the countryside and did oral history before the term existed. He arrived at writing through photography, writing, he said, “to explain the pictures.”
Bibliography (wildly incomplete)
Picturesque Hampshire (1890)
The Farmer’s Boy (1894)
The Picturesque St. Lawrence (1910)
Highways and Byways of Florida (1918)
Other links
Bibliography (Wikipedia)
Jones Library at Amherst
Wikipedia