Manchild In The Promised Land

429 pp. Manchild in the Promised Land is indeed one of the most remarkable stories of our time. This is a thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans who had moved from being sharecroppers in the South to the promised lands in the New York city ghetto, and of their children, raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.