ABSTRACT
The death notice of the American Booksellers Association in recounting the passing of Claude Brown speaks of Manchild being a "controversial book that exposed mainstream audiences to the stark realities of drugs and violence experienced by blacks in the 1940s and 1950s". The writing in Manchild is so stunning, so sociologically on target, that it merits at least a few excerpts. Brown's observations rival an earlier generation of ethnographers, but he has a sharper eye for detail and intimacy than say William Whyte had in Street Corner Society. The secret of Claude Brown was precisely his analytic skills coupled with street smarts, or better said, a desire for self-preservation. In the final analysis, the success, nay the worth of Manchild in the Promised Land was a function of Claude Brown's arrival as just a plain man in a turf not so much promised as full of promises.
