“Something Like a Harlem Renaissance West”: Black Popular Fiction, Self-Publishing, and the Origins of Street Literature: Interviews with Dr. Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the popularity of self-published street literature (also known as urban literature, ghetto fiction, and hip-hop literature) has exploded among African American readers. Starting with the publication of titles such as Teri Woods’s True to the Game (1998), Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), Vickie M. Stringer’s Let That Be the Reason (2001), and Nikki Turner’s A Hustler’s Wife (2003), street literature has emerged as a driving force in the African American publishing industry. Dozens of independent imprints, each publishing several books per year, sprang up virtually overnight, and now thousands of street literature novels compete for the attention of an ever-growing black readership. Some of the more influential independent publishers of this new genre include Urban Books, Teri Woods Publishing, and Stringer’s Triple Crown Publications, though new publishing houses arrive on the scene each year. Triple Crown Publications is probably the most successful of these new publishing houses, having sold more than a million books between its founding in 2001 and 2006.¹ As a further indication of street literature’s growing power in the marketplace, mainstream trade publishers (including Ballantine Books, Simon and Schuster, and St. Martin’s Press) have begun offering six-figure, multiple-book deals to some of the biggest names in the business, including K’wan Foye, Shannon Holmes, and Turner. These books can be purchased at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, at book vendor tables along 125th Street in Harlem, and in state and federal penitentiaries across the country.² Street literature is particularly popular in American cities with large black populations, including New York, Detroit, Houston, Oakland, and Atlanta. At a moment when the publishing and bookselling industry appears to be in decline, the rise of street literature reminds us that reading is very much alive in America today.³

Not everyone is thrilled about street literature’s growing popularity. Many of these books feature stories of drug dealers, pimps, hustlers, and sex workers and focus on urban violence, racism, misogyny, and sexuality. The explicit presentation of these issues combined with the casual editing practices of many publishers has resulted in a moral panic about these apparently pornographic novels. The most famous criticisms leveled at street literature were issued by Nick Chiles’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut.” In it, he argues that the rise of street literature represents nothing less than the “sexualization and degradation of black fiction” (A15). On the other side of the debate, librarians, booksellers, and even some educators argue that these books have created an unprecedented reading culture among young black people and that they offer inexperienced readers a gateway to such African American classics as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Whatever the case, it is clear that street literature is a growing cultural and economic enterprise. Driven by Internet fan sites, as well as the ever-expanding audience of black American prisoners, street literature represents an emerging popular genre of African American literature that cannot be ignored.⁴

While this black literary movement is a recent development, it has its origins in a small Los Angeles publishing company called Holloway House. In the mid-1960s, two white Hollywood copywriters, Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock, came up with the idea of publishing black crime literature. They published the autobiographies and crime novels of Robert Beck (also known as Iceberg Slim) and Donald Goines, now two of the most widely recognized pioneers of the street literature genre. Beck’s and Goines’s books have sold millions of copies in liquor stores, barber shops, and newsstands in black communities all across America; they established Holloway House Publishing Company as the first niche publisher of popular black fiction.⁵ Holloway House branded this body of literature “black experience” fiction, and like the street literature to which it...