d black ghetto. He has also produced social commentary for newspapers, professional journals and newspapers.
Synopsis, Manchild in the Promised Land
Manchild in the Promised Land is Claude Brown's novelized confessional autobiography. It is also very much an edgy account of social conditions for impoverished African Americans living in Harlem from the World War II era to about 1960. Beginning at the point of his young adolescence, when his career as a habitual truant and unrepentant juvenile delinquent was cut short by a bullet in the gut, Manchild in the Promised Land follows Claude Brown on his journey from childhood in Harlem through a period of sometimes painful dissociation from the world of "the street" to an educated young manhood in the city. Stealing, conning, and fighting his way through a childhood on the Harlem streets, Sonny is almost the prototypical juvenile delinquent. Starting at age 13, he is sent to a series of juvenile-detention homes, first at the Youth House in New York and later at two boys' schools in upstate New York, Wiltwyck and Warwick, where he hones his streetwise skills but where several counselors--and none other than Eleanor Roosevelt--attempt to point him in the direction of education and a better future.
Sonny resists it all. He is a great disappointment to his father, whose only apparent strategy for showing emotion for his son is to beat him regularly, and to his mother, who just wants him to "be good." To be sure, Sonny has some punishment coming. Repeatedly and casually he steals--food, cash, clothes, whatever he sees that he wants. Sonny's mother is always ready to support him, and works with authorities and the detention homes to try to stop his wicked ways before it is too late. Yet by age 16 he has left school and home for good and is established on the street as a drug dealer, fully expecting to be sent to prison at some time for dealing.
Then, at age 17, Sonny is mugged by a drug ...