Now a Scribner Classic, this landmark publication and 1965 bestseller chronicles the author's harrowing childhood of violent crime and poverty in Harlem--and has been widely celebrated as a classic of American literature by the lions of the literary world, including Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. One of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time, Manchild in the Promised Land is the thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem. It has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem--the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humor. The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because the book is affirmative and inspiring and still rings true today.