Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines - Hardcover

Allen, Eddie B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312291248 ISBN 13: 9780312291242

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2004

Synopsis

Donald Goines was a pimp, a truck driver, a heroin addict, a factory worker, and a career criminal. He was also one of world's most popular Black contemporary writers. Having published 16 novels, including Whoreson, Dopefiend, and Daddy Cool, Goines's unique brand of "street narrative" and "ghetto realism" mark him as the original street writer.

Now, in the first in-depth biography of Goines's life, author Eddie B. Allen explores exactly how one man could make the transition from street hustler to bestselling author. With exclusive access to personal letters, treatments from unwritten books, photographs, and family members, Allen uncovers Goines's personal experiences with drugs, prostitutes, prison, and urban violence. Fans of Goines's novels will note a dramatic parallelism between his life and his fictional tales.

About this title

About the Author:

Eddie B. Allen is a freelance writer and has covered national figures such as Bill Clinton and Louis Farrakhan. He has been published in the New York Times, The Detroit News, the Philadelphia New Observer, and The Michigan Chronicle. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

From Publishers Weekly:

It is indicative of both the explosive nature of Goines's subject matter (his works include Whoreson; Dopefiend and Black Gangster) and the timidity of the academy that Goines's achievement—selling more than five million books of utterly uncompromised fiction—has received little scholarly attention. Critic Allen's thorough and well-documented study will do much to change that, placing Goines's life and work in a coherent critical, historical and social frame. This book is clearly a labor of love, all the more creditable because Goines is often hard to like. A hustler, pimp and junkie who rejected his hard-working father's middle-class ethos, Goines hardly stood out from any number of doomed young men until, during a prison term, the spreading fame of Iceberg Slim reached him. The old story of redemption by art is vividly retold here, and the sense of Goines's growing awareness and ambition is well caught, as are the exigencies of paperback publication. Tragically, Goines could leave neither his addiction nor his violent past behind, and he was murdered—a case that remains unsolved—at the age of 35, in 1947. This work argues not only for a serious assessment of what Goines did achieve, but makes us mourn what he never got the chance to. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0312291248
• ISBN 13: 9780312291242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224