Brown, Claude

(born February 23, 1937, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 2, 2002, New York City) American author who wrote Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), a landmark work in African American literature that chronicled his poverty-stricken childhood in the Harlem district of New York City.

Brown turned to crime at a young age and eventually was sent to a reformatory in upstate New York. One of his teachers there took an interest in him and, after Brown returned to Harlem and criminal activity, encouraged him to pursue other options. Brown eventually completed high school and enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where one of his teachers was the writer Toni Morrison. He published his memoir the same year he graduated from Howard. The book was a critical and a commercial success, recognized as not just his story but that of an entire generation of African American youth. He followed that effort with a novel, The Children of Ham (1976), about Harlem teenagers struggling against heroin addiction.

Brown was also an essayist and lecturer. He attracted attention in the 1980s with a series of magazine articles about the epidemic of crack cocaine. He was working on a third book at the time of his death.