The Rise of Street Literature

The Rise of Street Literature

By Almah LaVon Rice

 

IN PERCIVAL EVERETT’S NOVEL Erasure, Thelonious Ellison is a college professor who writes novels that are more praised than read. His work’s engagement with French post-structuralists and ancient Greek literature impresses and baffles reviewers, who wonder what those subjects have to do with the African-American experience. Frustrated by his latest novel’s seventh rejection and angered by the success of the street-lit hit We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Ellison dashes off a novella parodying the “true, gritty real stories of [B]lack life” that he has been advised to write. This satiric tale, which is included in Erasure in its entirety, is peopled with stock characters like the perennially scowling thug and the vapid baby mama. It is sent to Random House as a protest, but to Ellison’s amazement and chagrin he is offered a $600,000 advance for his “magnificently raw and honest” account. Compromised, disgusted and rich, Ellison creates a reclusive, ex-con writer persona that the literary world celebrates as a “real! live! scary! Black male!” writer in their midst.

Although Erasure is fictional, it is dead-on about the high-octane rise of a genre often called street lit. Also called ghetto lit, urban fiction and gangsta lit—as well as hip-hop’s literary equivalent—it unofficially burst on the scene in 1999. That’s when breakaway success greeted the novel The Coldest Winter Ever penned by rapper-activist Sista Souljah. Still considered to be the one of the best offerings in urban fiction, Souljah’s tale chronicles the hustling life and times of Winter Santiaga, who stole clothes and transported drugs for a living. Now considered classics, other novels from the late ‘90s  include Teri Woods’s True to the Game and Vickie Stringer’s Let That Be The Reason. Both writers published their own books and sold them from the trunks of their cars after collecting numerous rejections from mainstream publishers. Since that time, Woods’s novels have grossed more than $15 million, and she is now signed with a division of Warner Books, while Stringer has built an urban-fiction empire out of her Triple Crown Publications.

According to Essence’s bestseller lists, which reflect data from Black bookstores across the country, street lit accounts for almost all of the current top-selling paperbacks. Rachelle Williams can testify to this from when she worked at Karibu Books in suburban Maryland near Washington, D.C. “I would say about 70 percent of the customers who came into the store bought these books, either for themselves or to send to a family member or friend in jail,” recalls Williams, who is now a doctoral student at the University of Maryland and has written about the genre.

Bestseller lists can’t comprehensively capture the numbers though, because most street lit is not sold at bookstores, but at barber shops, beauty salons, sidewalk kiosks and online. And now the media moguls want a piece of the pie. Traditional publishers like Kensington Books, Simon & Schuster and St. Martin’s have created urban-fiction divisions. Nikki Turner, who started out as a Triple Crown Publications author, now has her own imprint with Random House/Ballantine. Turner has penned popular titles like A Project Chick and, with rapper 50 Cent, Death Before Dishonor. With his G-Unit Books—an imprint of MTV/Pocket Books—“Fitty” has extended his brand into print, even promoting his songs and vitamin water in his ghostwritten novellas. 

Why is the genre so hot?

Look no further than Shakespeare, advises Kevin Weeks, an Atlanta-based author of street fiction. As in Shakespeare’s plays, Weeks says, “universal elements of love, sex, jealousy, betrayal, murder and revenge” make for compelling storytelling in urban fiction.

Street lit’s provenance, though, goes back to Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim (who inspired the naming of Ice Cube and Ice T, respectively). The two are widely cited as the godfathers of the literary genre. Iceberg Slim, born as Robert Lee Maupin and also known as Robert Beck, started writing in the ‘60s after his release from prison. His novels—Pimp, Trick Baby and Death Wish— drew from his own experiences in society’s underbelly. Slim’s books were, and continue to be, wildly popular among Black audiences and beyond. He even inspired Donald Goines to start writing when he was imprisoned. Goines’s prodigious output includes Whoreson, Dopefiend, and White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief and the books sample from his sojourn as a heroin addict. Goines continues to be quoted by today’s rappers, more than 30 years after his murder in the streets of Detroit.

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