Manchild in the Promised Land

“Atlanta Journal” He writes about his life – and Harlem – with frank, brutal, and beautiful power. Mr. Brown’s graphic narrative will make you laugh, cry, think, and possibly understand.Daniel A. Poling Brown’s Harlem is alive in a way that no black ghetto has heretofore been brought to life between book jackets.Dick Schaap “Books” This is a magnificent book, not a good book, not an interesting book, a magnificent book….It is a guided tour of hell conducted by a man who broke out.James Baldwin A tremendous achievement.Nat Hentoff “Book Week” Sprung from the alley, a rare cat…As a survivor among the dying and the dead, Brown tells it like it was-and like it still is.Norman Mailer The first thing I ever read which gave me an idea of what it would be like day by day if I’d grown up in Harlem.Romulus Linney “The New York Times Book Review” It is written with brutal and unvarnished honesty in the plain talk of the people, in language that is fierce, uproarious, obscene and tender.Tom Wolfe “Manchild in the Promised Land” is Claude Brown’s unforgettable epic of growing up as a boy on the streets of Harlem. His Zola-esque gift for slices of life is made all the more striking by his brilliant insights into character and social pressures.Tom Wolfe “New York Herald Tribune” Incredible! No Negro writer ever told the whole street thing in Harlem: Claude Brown is the first.William Mathes “Los Angeles Times” Sometimes a unique voice speaks out so clearly and with so much passion that it comes to speak for an era, a generation, a people…and we have to listen.

Claude Brown was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem. At age seventeen, after serving several terms in reform school, he left Harlem for Greenwich Village. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and attended law school. He also wrote a book called The Children of Ham in 1976. Manchild in the Promised Land evolved from an article he published in Dissent magazine during his first year at college. He died in 2002 at the age of 64.

Nathan McCall, author of Makes Me Wanna Holler, has worked as a journalist for The Washington Post. Currently, he teaches in the African American Studies Department at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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