1 . Daniels, "Claude Brown's World," 26.

2. Mailer, Baldwin, and Schaap provided blurbs for the paperback edition; Howe apparently wrote a letter recommending the book to potential reviewers. Citations follow for those reviews of Manchild not cited elsewhere: Garry Wills, "In Defense of Uncle Toms," Commonweal, 12 November 1965, 178-80; Romulus Linney, "Growing Up the Hard Way," New York Times Book Review, 22 August 1965, I; Daniel Aaron, "Out of the Closet," New Statesman, 5 August 1966, 204; Whitney Balliett, "Please, Mr. Goldberg," New Yorker, 13 November 1965, 242-44.

3. Warren Miller, "Teen-Ager in Trouble," New York Times Book Review, 19 June 1960, 14.

4. Miller, "One Score in Harlem," 49.

5. Miller, "Teen-Ager in Trouble," 14.

6. Raymond Schroth, "In the Promised Land," America, 28 August 1965, 213.

7. Ibid.

8. Tom Wolfe, "A Harlem Writer Who Makes James Baldwin Look Like a Tourist," Sunday Herald-Tribune Magazine, 18 July 1965, 4.

9. Ibid.

10. See, e.g., Sharon Malinowski, ed., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 428-29; Elizabeth W. Miller and Mary L. Fisher, eds., The Negro in America: A Bibliography, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 79-80.

11. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Th e Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), 60; Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 212.

12. Wolfe, "A Harlem Writer Who Makes James Baldwin Look Like a Tourist," 5; Brown, interview, 21 June 1993.

13. A prefatory note from "the Editors" on the inside front page (no page number) outlines the narrative of decline (Dissent 8 [Summer 1961]).

14. Herbert Slochower, "The Juvenile Delinquent and the Mythic Hero," Dissent 8 (Summer 1961): 417.

15. Michael Harrington, "Harlem Today," Dissent 8 (Summer 1961): 371.

16. Claude Brown, "Harlem, My Harlem," Dissent 8 (Summer 1961): 378.

17. Robert Nichols, "The City: A Poem," 219; Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman, "Banning Cars from Manhattan," 304; Daniel Bell, "The Three Faces of New York," 222; all in Dissent 8 (Summer 1961).

18. Brown, interview, 21 June 1993.

19. Miller, "One Score in Harlem," 49.

20. Nat Hentoff, "Sprung from the Alley, a Rare Cat," Book Week, 22 August 1965,5.

21. Paul Goodman, "Growing Up Black," New York Review of Books, 26 August 1965, 8-10.

22. Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land, 87.

23. "Ghetto Graduate," Economist, 24 September 1966, 1259.

24. Miller, "One Score in Harlem," 49.

25. Warren Miller, "Author's Note," in The Sleep of Reason (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), xiii. Miller explains that the manuscript was circulated to New York publishers while the Army-McCarthy hearings were being held, that no publisher would touch it, and that the novel was therefore first published in England.

26. Michael Stone's article "Three Lives" in New York, 30 January 1989, 35-42, casts Claude Brown in the role of founding father by featuring him as the oldest of three characters who together provide a generational portrait of New York's postwar ghettos. Brown (age fifty-one), Darryel Gordon (twenty-three, born the year of Manchild's publication), and a baby named Lucy together "track the story of the city's slums" (35). For Brown, the elder statesman and prototypical "manchild," that story is a narrative of decline with which Nelson Algren (or Irving Howe, for that matter) would feel right at home: ''During his childhood, Brown recalls, 'a lot of the older people used to say that the place was going to hell, but Harlem was in its innocence compared to today.' " Asked how he would "have fared growing up in the ghetto today," Brown readily responds (in the article's closing line), "' I'd be dead' " (42).

27. Sapphire, Push (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 3.

28. Brown, interview, 21 June 1993.