56 pages • 1 hour read
Manchild in the Promised Land
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Background
Authorial Context: Claude Brown
Claude Brown was born in New York City in 1937. His parents, former sharecroppers, moved from South Carolina to Harlem in 1935, and the family—which included Brown’s younger brother and two sisters—lived in tenement housing for many years. Around the age of six, Brown became involved with local street gangs and began drinking alcohol, committing petty crimes, and skipping school. His parents sent him to South Carolina to live with his grandparents for a year, but this did not change his behavior. At 11, he was sent to the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a reform school in upstate New York, where he met Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist who would have a profound effect on him. Upon leaving Wiltwyck, however, Brown’s criminal activities continued, and he was sent to various juvenile detention facilities and eventually began dealing drugs. At 13, he was shot in the stomach during an attempted robbery.
After realizing that heroin and gang violence were destroying the lives of his childhood friends, Brown moved from Harlem to Greenwich Village. He worked odd jobs during the day and attended school at night, soon receiving his high school diploma. He graduated from Howard University in 1965, the same year Manchild in the Promised Land was published. Although he attended law school at Stanford and Rutgers, he did not finish a law degree, choosing instead to focus on writing and public speaking. His second novel, Children of Ham (1976), also examines the ways heroin ravaged the lives of Black teenagers, but it was a commercial failure. Brown continued to write about his experiences growing up in Harlem, publishing works in magazines such as Esquire and Dissent, until his death in New York City in 2002.
Literary Context: The Bildungsroman
The bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the moral, psychological, and intellectual growth of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood. The term combines the German words bildung (education) and roman (novel) and was coined in 1819 by German philologist Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern. Broadly speaking, the bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, but it is defined by particular formal and thematic characteristics. The protagonist is generally a young, naive person who sets out in the beginning of the narrative to find answers to life’s major questions; they arrive at these answers through a series of experiences away from home and out in the world. Early in their journey, they often experience an emotional loss that motivates them to move forward, and they eventually achieve greater maturity by overcoming challenges and setbacks. In a typical bildungsroman, the protagonist is ultimately accepted into society—or otherwise finds a place of stability—and in turn, accepts society’s norms as their own. They may also help others around them get on a similar path of self-discovery and self-improvement. Although it predates Morgenstern’s coining of the term, the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice (1795-1796), by German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is widely considered the first bildungsroman.
While Manchild in the Promised Land departs from some conventions of the bildungsroman, it hews closely to many others. Claude is motivated by a strong desire to find his place in the world, be accepted by his peers, and cultivate a sense of selfhood; he endures a number of painful obstacles that both make him question his own choices and motivate him to keep trying. By the end of the novel, after improving his own lot in life, he actively tries to help his friends and his younger brother do the same. Ultimately, he seems to have answered a number of his own questions, whether or not he knew—at the tender age of six—that he had them.
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