Claude Brown

Manchild in the Promised Land has sold over 4 million copies and has been translated to 14 different languages. As of 2002 it was on the curriculum in many high schools and colleges. The book was banned in certain schools for its use of frank language. In 1971, a complaint in the Chicago Daily Defender, asserted that the book is "pornographic literature," and had "428 incidents of impure words." The book was banned in 1974 at a high school in Massachusetts because the headmaster found the language "filthy."

Claude Brown died on February 2, 2002 in New York, New York.

Brown graduated in 1965 from Howard University (where his professors included sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Hare), and later went on to attend Stanford and Rutgers law schools. He left when the lecture circuit proved more lucrative than law.

Brown published a second book, Children Of Ham, which explores the lives of several black teenagers from Harlem who escape the clutches of heroin. In comparison to sales of his first work, it was a failure. He wrote several articles for national magazines, including Esquire and Look. In 1961, Brown’s article "Harlem, My Harlem" was published in Dissent.

In Brown’s mid-teens, he made a living by dealing drugs and becoming a con man. In 1953, he worked in the garment district, but he quit the job after a short time. His younger brother, who he had always thought of as being innocent, became addicted to drugs. In Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown blames his brother’s unhealthy lifestyle on not having been exposed to the horrors of Harlem early enough in life.

These harsh realities of life in 1950s Harlem shaped his childhood. Hoping that a year away from Harlem would benefit him, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in South Carolina. However, this just made Brown crave the violence of the streets. At the age of 11, he was placed in the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a reform school.

Claude Brown (February 23, 1937 – February 2, 2002) was the author of Manchild in the Promised Land, published to critical acclaim in 1965, which tells the story of his coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Harlem. He also published Children of Ham (1976).

Brown was born on February 23, 1937 in New York, New York. The autobiographical Manchild in the Promised Land describes the cultural, economic, and religious conditions that suffused Harlem during Brown's early childhood and adolescence while constructing a narrative of Brown's tumultuous early life. The book explains that in the early 20th century, New York was thought to be the promised land for African Americans, but life in Harlem was more challenging than migrants expected.

Brown’s parents, who had been sharecroppers, moved from South Carolina to Harlem in 1935. They had children and lived in a tenement at 146th Street and Eighth Avenue. Brown had one younger brother and two sisters. From the age of six, his life involved stealing, alcohol consumption, truancy, and gang wars.