C. Brown, 64; Author and Social Critic

Claude Brown, who created a harrowing, evocative portrait of inner city life in his seminal 1965 memoir, “Manchild in the Promised Land,” died Saturday in New York City from a lung condition. He was 64.

In a forthright, dignified voice, Brown cast a stark light on an urban America at the boiling point--street fighters, thieves, junkies and guns: a population at wits’ end. Drawing on his experiences as a black youth toughened by Harlem streets, Brown detailed inner city landscapes that were shaped by the consequences of violence and poverty. His sharp portrayal swept away the vague depictions of urban life that had come before.

“Manchild” sold more than 4 million copies and was translated into 14 languages, ultimately becoming required reading at high schools and colleges across the country. It arrived at a crucial juncture in American social history, in the midst of the civil rights revolution and the dawning of the black pride movement.

“It was in the tradition of classic narratives like [those of] Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X,” said writer and activist Amiri Baraka. “In fact, ‘Manchild’ arrived at the same time as Malcolm X’s autobiography, and I think that they were both testaments of the kind of rage we were seeing in Watts, Detroit and Newark. The rage of the working class and poor black people. It was illumination for those who didn’t know it. And confirmation for those who needed it. It was as if, if the fire could talk, this is what he would say.”

Born in Harlem, Brown was the son of a railroad worker and a domestic, who, like many black families during the great South-to-North migration, left South Carolina for the “promised land” of New York in the early 1930s.

What awaited them, however, was a string of social horrors and slender opportunities. Growing up in a tenement on 146th Street, Brown was swept into the undercurrent of the street. Kicked out of school at 8, he was caught up in gang life by 9. Shot in the leg during a robbery, by 14 he was shipped off to reform school.

There, he impressed Ernest Papanek, psychologist and director of the Wiltwyck School for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys in Ulster County, N.Y., who lured him into the world of books.

With that, Brown’s path shifted dramatically. A series of part-time jobs saw him through night school and a high school diploma. Moving to Washington, D.C., he enrolled in classes at Howard University.

During his freshman year, he was asked to write an article for Dissent magazine, referred by his old mentor, Papanek. The article, raw and immediate, caught the attention of a New York editor at Macmillan who promptly offered him a $2,000 advance for what would eventually evolve into “Manchild.”

Reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times in July 1965, William Mathes called Brown’s slightly fictionalized autobiography “a book hot with the words and problems of contemporary America, but brimming with the kind of humanistically based compassion and feeling that will speak to many generations to come .... It will be read by those interested in sharing the life of a stubborn, courageous, magnificent young human being .... Here is what it feels like to grow up in Harlem, what it is to grow into a manhood defined by drugs, theft, prostitution and murder. And Claude Brown re-defines his manhood as he goes, as he searches for an identity strong enough to survive in the world he finds himself.”

In the years after his book’s success, Brown kept his focus on the core racial and social issues that inhabited “Manchild,” this time in real world settings. He was graduated from Howard in 1965, attended law school at Stanford and Rutgers, and flirted with the notion of public life.

Throughout his life, what motivated and consumed him was the world of politics and social change, at the grass-roots level and beyond. He looked for opportunities to render marginalized communities and sway opinion--often lecturing and writing articles and essays to help illuminate the inequalities and inadequacies still plaguing communities of color in urban settings.

Brown’s work was part of a continuum, said Thomas Porter, former dean of Afro-American studies at Ohio University.

“Richard Wright wrote about his experiences in Mississippi in ‘Black Boy.’ James Baldwin certainly talked [about] his experience in Harlem,” Porter said. “But Claude was young himself, and his book was close to the bone, because Claude had not been too far removed from the things that he wrote about.

“I mean, Baldwin was in the ‘hood, but he wasn’t ‘Boyz in the ‘Hood’--in and out of institutions and then overcoming,” he added. “That’s what young black men were experiencing. And it wasn’t documented in the way it was lived.”

In 1976, Brown published “Children of Ham,” which followed a group of Harlem teenagers trying to elude heroin’s hold. The book suffered critically and couldn’t emerge from the broad shadow of “Manchild” a decade before.

In later years, Brown lectured on urban issues and was a frequent op-ed page contributor.

“Now America’s inner cities have become the spawning grounds for adolescents who bear increasingly appalling resemblances to rabid, homicidal maniacs,” Brown reflected in the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “They are acting out slaughterous action scenes from the most barbarous gangster movies on the streets of major American cities in real life, in living color.”

Though he left New York in the ‘70s, settling in Newark, N.J., Brown maintained his emotional connection to Harlem. His final book, which contrasted the lives of children growing up in 1980s Harlem with those in his Harlem of the past, was never completed.

Brown’s commitment to social justice, and his authentic voice, said Porter, are what will continue to resonate. “I love ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ but Claude’s book was Holden Caulfield for African Americans,” he said.

“It was a book of its time in its heat. And it came in a moment where there was a big redefinition of community control of schools in Harlem. I was teaching junior high school and training urban teachers, and I was teaching Claude Browns and Claudine Browns every day--the kids we were trying to reach.”

The writer’s marriage to Helen Brown ended in divorce. He is survived by his companion, Laura Higgins; a daughter, Denise Brown Hallum of Burtonsville, Md.; and a son, Nathaniel of Boston.