Since I am an author and  publisher of Urban Literature, I though you all would be interested in the history of Urban Lit.  This is a genre of fiction known variously as “street lit,” “ghetto lit,” “urban lit” or “hip-hop lit” has begun registering impressive sales, catching the attention of the publishing industry. Previously sold as typewritten photocopies on street corners, these pulp-fiction books now appear in slick paperbacks available in bookstores and online, for instance on my website: http://www.gstreetchronicles.com. I found most of the following information on Wikipedia.

Urban Fiction was (and largely still is) a genre written by and for African American’s.  Although my book Drama has universal appeal.. In his famous essay “The Souls of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois discussed how a veil separated the African American community from the outside world.^[1] By extension, fiction written by people outside the African American culture could not (at least with any degree of verisimilitude) depict the people, settings, and events experienced by people in that culture. Try as some might, those who grew up outside the veil (i.e., outside the urban culture) simply could not write fiction truly grounded in inner-city and African American life.

In 1965, The Autobiography of Malcom X was published. Because this non-fictional read captured the realistic nature of African American urban life for coming-of-age young men, the book has consistently served as a standard for reading among African American teenaged boys.

In the 1970s, during the culmination of the Black Power movement, a jailed Black man named Robert Beck took the pen name Iceberg Slim and wrote Pimp, a dark, gritty tale of life in the inner-city underworld. While the book contained elements of the Black Power agenda, it was most notable for its unsparing depiction of street life. Iceberg Slim wrote many other novels and attained an international following. Some of the terminology he used in his books crossed over into the lexicon of Black English.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, urban fiction in print experienced a decline. However, one could make a cogent argument that urban tales simply moved from print to music,^[3] as hip hop music exploded in popularity, with harsh, gritty stories such as “The Message” and “Dopeman,” set to a driving, strident drum rhythm. Of course, for every emcee who signed a recording contract and made the airwaves, ten more amateurs plied the streets and local clubs, much like urban troubadours telling urban fiction in an informal, oral manner rather than in a neat, written form.  Hip Hop lit in print form, though, is thriving.^[

Toward the end of the 1990s, urban fiction experienced a revival, as demand for novels authentically conveying the urban experience increased, and new business models enabled fledgling writers to more easily bring a manuscript to market. With this new wave of renaissance street lit comes a whole new ballgame when it comes to promotion and exposure. Aside from hand-to-hand sales, which seems to work best in a genre where word-of-mouth has proven to be worth more than any large ad campaign, the Internet has increased the authors and publishers the ability to reach out to the genre’s readers. With Internet savvy, many self-published authors who once had no shot of recognition are now household names.

You are all invited to my website to investigate the books that fit this genre very well.

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