Charlie: A Narrative Portrait of Charles Lang

by Warren Lehrer

Charlie is a gifted musician struggling to step outside the revolving door of a mental health industry that has defined and sustained him for over seventeen years. Walls are blank canvases for thoughts and images; silence gives birth to sheets of sound and song; daily events are charged with layers of reflective feeling. This portrait of Charles Lang, illuminated by Lang's own drawings, chronicles the journey of an unrelenting, warm, funny, imaginative spirit in a world that too often rewards strength over sensitivity.

199 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

Warren Lehrer is a writer and artist/designer known internationally as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship. His work explores the vagaries and luminescence of character, the relationships between social structures and the individual, and the pathos and absurdity of life. His books are acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the traditions of storytelling with the printed page.

Lehrer has received many awards for his books and multimedia projects, including the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, three AIGA Book Awards, The International Book Design Award, a Media That Matters Award, and grants and fellowships from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Rockefeller,
Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. Lehrer is a professor at the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, and a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Together with his wife Judith Sloan, Lehrer founded EarSay in 1991, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. Over the last few years, he has been setting stories and text into animation, video, and interactive media. His latest novel, A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, is on sale now.