American · 1923–1971
John Okada was a Japanese American writer born in Seattle in 1923. He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II, then studied at the University of Washington and Columbia University and later worked as a librarian and technical writer, including at Detroit and Seattle. His family had been interned during the war, an experience that shaped his only novel. No-No Boy, published in 1957, follows a Japanese American man who refused military service and the loyalty oath and returns home to a hostile community. The book sold poorly, and Okada died of a heart attack in 1971, aged 47, believing it had failed. After his death, writers Jeffery Paul Chan and Frank Chin found a copy and helped republish it in 1976 through the Combined Asian Resources Project. It has since become a foundational work of Asian American literature. Okada left an unfinished second novel about Japanese immigrants, but his widow was unable to preserve it.