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Manchild in the Promised Land

Manchild in the Promised Land. Claude Brown. 1965.

Claude Brown was born in Harlem in 1937. By the age of 13, he was a streetwise kid and "master thief" (Brown, Ham 1). Over the next four years, he spent several months at a time in various juvenile detention halls, and his account of his experience in Manchild is that he became inured to psychological and physical violence and brutality. His father was only too ready to smack him for disobedience, which made home life often unendurable. But there was also violence in the streets that became Brown's real home.

Brown became adept at casual theft, and though he did not make a career out of violent crime, he and his peers were attracted to the culture of violence: "The weather permitting, on Saturday nights my hoodlum-wannabe friends and I would hang out on 146th Street waiting to see who would get killed. We were rarely disappointed" (Brown, "Language" 2B).

Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown's autobiographical novel, was published in 1965, when Brown was 32 years old and a Rutgers Law School graduate. As Manchild has it, his psychological odyssey out of the trap of streetwise drugs hustling to university education had begun unexpectedly. He was 17 and on the brink of hardening his life of petty drug crime (marijuana dealing) because he was no longer a juvenile and could not avoid having a record if he were to be arrested. When he was mugged by a heroin addict, his choices were rather simple: kill the pathetic addict to maintain his status on the streets or go straight. He enrolled in night school to get his diploma, moved out of Harlem, and in the following several years endured severe financial and social hardships to complete his education.

Brown appears to have become the hope of his family. He followed Manchild in the Promised Land with a novelistic sociological narrative, The Children of Ham (1976), a bleak account of conditions in the drugs- and shooting-gallery-ravage...

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Manchild in the Promised Land. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:57, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1695157.html