Claude Brown. (tribute).

Claude Brown, like Ralph Ellison, is best remembered for one book: Manchild in the Promised Land. When this novelistic autobiography exploded onto the literary and social scene in 1965, it was like holding a mirror up to America's seething wasteland, reflecting the rage and upheaval that ripped apart so many cities across the country in the mid-1960s.

Manchild in the Promised Land was a catchy title with corrosive content. The book conjured up the social pathology and the psychological trauma of black Americans caught in the throes of unforgiving ghettoes, particularly Harlem, where Brown took his first steps into an odyssey that came to an end this year, on February 2. According to his longtime companion, Laura Higgins, Brown died of a lung condition in Manhattan.

Since its publication, Manchild in the Promised Land has sold more than four million copies and has been translated into 14 languages, according to its publisher, the Macmillan Company.

A quick scan of the Internet reveals the impact of Brown's powerful narrative. It is often listed along with Maya Angelou's captivating memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Jack Kerouac's On the Road as required texts in high school and college courses. Each book evokes a poignant patch of the American experience rarely explored. Brown's 429 pages offer a graphic, sometimes repulsive, portrait of a community badly deteriorated since the halcyon days of the Harlem Renaissance.

Manchild, to some degree, also filled a literary gap, which up to that time had relied considerably on the essays of James Baldwin for a voice and representation of Harlem. A blurb on the first issue proclaimed the book as a "guided tour to hell conducted by a man who broke out" It was a consistently chilling account of institutional life and the inherent violence and anomie of Brown's world. Even at an early age, the destiny of the book's protagonist was forecast.

"The neighborhood prophets began making prophecies about my life-span," Sonny said. "They all had me dead, buried, and forgotten before my twenty-first birthday.

These predictions were based on false tales of policemen shooting at me, on truthful tales of my falling off a trolley car into the midst of oncoming traffic while hitching a ride, and also on my uncontrollable urge to steal" These lines from the opening pages exemplify Brown's searing prose and mark a portion of his furious passage into manhood.

Brown was born in Harlem in 1937 and came of age amid the turbulence of 146th Street and Eighth Avenue. Like so many families at the time, the Browns had migrated from the South to the city only two years before his birth. The narrator of Brown's book, Sonny, had already lived two lifetimes before he reached 14, when he was confined to a reform school. As he relates in the book, Sonny began "catting" (skipping school) in the third grade. This led to several expulsions. By the time he was 10, he was a charter member of a gang, and at 13 he was shot during a burglary. The latter incident is vividly recalled in the book's first chapter.

Were it not for Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and director of the Wiltwyck School for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys in New York, Brown might have fulfilled that grim prophecy he wrote about. The doctor and the institution helped stabilize Brown's rambunctious ways, directing that energy to a more constructive end.

After leaving Wiltwyck, to whom he dedicated his book, Brown went to night school and worked in a number of menial jobs. The dramatic turnabout propelled him to Howard University. While a student there he wrote an article for Dissent magazine that caught the eye of an editor at Macmillan. Brown received an offer and two years later submitted a manuscript more than 1500 pages long.

At the core of Manchild is Sonny's struggle to transcend his hell-like environment that is unrelieved by an abusive father and a dutiful, but complacent mother. The streets of Harlem are Brown's surrogate parents and they are no less comforting, albeit far more exhilarating. Not a day passes when Sonny isn't witnessing tragedy and trying to extricate himself from attack. To survive, he relies on his instincts and his ready fists.

If there is a salvation, it is education, which Sonny gradually accepts. "Manchild in the Promised Land," writes literary critic, Penelope Lefew, "continues to hold its place in the African American literary canon as one of the first works to portray accurately and honestly the Black struggle against a hostile environment and social system"

Brown would go on to write countless articles and The Children of Ham in 1976, which is signaled in the foreword of Manchild, but the book never received the same critical acclaim. Brown continued to write and teach, and his lectures were always gripping, often recounting his perilous childhood and adolescence, and the violence that awaited him at every turn.

Undoubtedly, Manchild was Brown's magnum opus. And at the book's close he reminds the reader about the essence of his tale, as well as its source. "To me, home was the streets. I suppose there are many people who felt that. If home was so miserable, the street was the place to be. I wonder if mine was really so miserable, or if it was that there was so much happening out in the streets that it made home seem such a dull and dismal place"

It is our hope that Manchild, Sonny and Brown are in that other Promised Land.

--Herb Boyd is coeditor of Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America, the editor of Autobiography of a People: Three Centuries of African American History and national editor of The Black World Today (TBWT.com), an online publication.