laude Brown was fated, it seems, to narrate the story of his troubled generation of black men. He was born and reared in Harlem, the mythic heartland of black America. His father was an alcoholic railroad worker who beat Claude and his siblings. His mother was a devoted if exasperated woman who sought to get her son sent to juvenile-delinquency programs because, by the time he was 8, he'd already begun a life of crime. Brown was a gang member, a thief and a drug dealer. When he was a teenager, a drug addict shot him in the stomach. Somewhat miraculously, he eluded the designed-to-fail circumstances of his upbringing with the help of reform school. Eventually, at 22, he enrolled at Howard University, where he met Toni Morrison, a young writing instructor who encouraged and assessed his early literary efforts. Six years later, in 1965, he published his searing masterpiece, ''Manchild in the Promised Land,'' an autobiographical novel that has sold more than 4 million copies.

Brown says that the people he wrote about are ''sons and daughters of former Southern sharecroppers . . . the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression.'' I first read Brown's book when I was 12 years old. My mother and father had been swept to Detroit in the great migration of Southern blacks, in their case, from Alabama and Georgia. ''I want to talk about the experiences of a misplaced generation . . . in an extremely complex, confused society,'' Brown wrote. ''This is a story of their searching, their dreams, their sorrows, their small and futile rebellions, and their endless battle to establish their own place in America's greatest Metropolis -- and in America itself.'' I didn't just read those words; they read me. They plumbed my chaotic and violent urban existence and allowed me, for the first time, to interpret my experience as the child of two Southern souls wrenched from their native soil. It was the secular, though no less inspiring, literary twin to Malcolm X's autobiographical tale of redemption as self-invention.

''Manchild'' was Brown's one book. Strictly speaking, he wrote another, ''Children of Ham,'' in 1976, but ''Manchild'' was the one that his career lived on for more than 35 years. It would be easy to dismiss him as a man who hit literary pay dirt once and milked it for the rest of his life. But that would misunderstand the way Brown spent the balance of his years after writing the book -- trying to prevent younger, less hopeful, more dangerous Claude Browns from doing themselves in with the help of a callous state. He maintained a fierce belief that troubled children could be reached, because the boys he ran with as a youth were worth saving. ''I spent a lot of time in correctional facilities with adults and adolescents,'' he said. ''And every time I walk out of those huge prison gates, I sense, I could have been there.'' He was not alone.

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