Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown

Brown to write an article about ghetto life for Dissent magazine.Īn editor at Macmillan encouraged the student to enlarge his magazine piece into book form. Brown wrote 'Manchild' while studying at Howard University in the early 1960s. Brown was denounced by some black publications for fostering, among other notions, in his books and testimonies the idea of street gangs offering support not found at home. It was poverty, he insisted, that led to drug abuse and violence. He said race was less an issue - he knew whites in the same predicament - than cycles of poverty. He had too many problems, too many frustrations.' 'He beat the hell out of me and that was it. 'I never was close to my father,' he said at one Capitol Hill hearing, also describing how his father once cut another man's throat. He was known for his raw, passionate and succinct voice on the page and at the lectern. Brown was called before congressional panels on urban ills and other distinguished circles debating the grim realities of ghetto life. 'Manchild' was so unrelenting yet humane that Tom Wolfe in the old New York Herald Tribune wrote that the author 'makes James Baldwin and all that old Rock of Ages rhetoric sound like some kind of Moral Rearmament tourist from Toronto come to visit the poor.' Required reading in many high schools and colleges, the text became one of Macmillan's most popular titles. Brown's book, a thinly veiled personal account of his experiences with killers, prostitutes, drug dealers and those who led him to redemption, was translated into 14 languages. Brown in a class with Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright as the premier interpreters of black urban life in mid-century. 'Manchild,' published at the height of the civil rights movement, instantly put Mr. Claude Brown, 64, the author of the controversial 1965 semi-autobiographical novel 'Manchild in the Promised Land,' a punishing look at street life and survival in Harlem that sold more than 4 million copies, died of a lung ailment Feb.

Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown