Manchild in the Promised Land is generally acknowledged to be among the first personal accounts of life in the African-American urban ghetto. Narrated using the language of the streets, the autobiography compellingly documents the horrors of drugs and violence without becoming preachy or ideological. Brown’s own life as a survivor and victor lends authority to his voice as he recounts the wasted lives of friends, some already dead, who were unable to overcome the Harlem street life. Young readers can relate to the story of this streetwise youth, who could operate successfully within the urban underworld but who was wise enough to see that it was a dead end.

Although Brown never glamorizes the life of drugs, violence, and prostitution, his use of humor and understatement allows him to avoid didacticism. He relates the story of his “religious conversion” as he rolled on the floor of a storefront church and shouted words of salvation, all in an attempt to get a date with the minister’s daughter. He can even recall his shooting at thirteen with a certain amount of humor. He tells of lying bleeding on the floor of a fish-and-chips shop while his mother hysterically jumped up and down, each jump vibrating the floor and causing the bullet lodged in his stomach to burn more painfully. He also tells of teenage girls visiting the hospital where he was recuperating from the wound and pulling down the bed sheets to verify the location of his injury.

Brown generalizes the significance of his autobiography beyond his own life by following the lives of friends and relatives. Turk, a boyhood friend who in the open-ing pages of the book is shown pleading with Claude not to tell the police that he was with him during the shooting, became a professional boxer and a model for those who want to escape the street life. Danny Rogers, the son of the minister for whom Sonny feigns conversion, managed to defeat his long drug addiction and is last viewed as a loving father to his children. On the other hand, Claude’s younger brother, Pimp, was one of Harlem’s victims. Abused by his father, he became a junkie and finally was jailed for armed robbery. A ray of hope exists, however, as Pimp is reported to be putting his life together and to have obtained his high-school diploma in prison. There was no hope for friends such as Butch and Tony, who died from overdoses, or for Sugar, Brown’s former girlfriend, whom he found prostituting herself to pay for drugs.

Brown does not pretend to be able to answer why some were able to escape the ravages of drugs and violence while others succumbed, although he recognizes luck as a factor and speaks with Turk about being alive because of luck. He tells of becoming violently ill during his first use of drugs, a circumstance that he realizes may have saved him from addiction. He also acknowledges figures who befriended him at critical periods in his life—particularly describing the integrity and honesty of Ernst Papanek, a director of the Wiltwyck School for Boys, and the intellect and sensitivity of Reverend William James, a Harlem minister. He dedicates the book to Eleanor Roosevelt, who founded the Wiltwyck School, and to the Wiltwyck School itself.