Charles Perry (1924–1969) was an African American author whose only published novel was Portrait of a Young Man Drowning.
Portrait of a Young Man Drowning draws heavily on Perry's first hand research of gangsters and juvenile delinquents in his own Brooklyn neighborhood.
An homage to James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel is written in the first person and tells the story of Harold.
He is a young man who gets sucked into Brooklyn's underworld scene, while living with an overbearing mother.
Perry soon began work on a semi-autobiographical account of the death of his 11-year-old son Charles Jr., who died falling from a tree onto a rod iron fence entitled I Wake Up Screaming.