With the publication of Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940, many American readers were confronted for the first time with the harsh realities of black ghetto life. Of the Afro-American urban realists who have appeared on the literary scene since Wright, Nathan C. Heard is one of the most important still publishing today. Despite the mixed popular and critical responses accorded his work, he continues to depict with stark and brutal frankness the violence, frustrations, thwarted dreams, and tragedies of black ghetto experience.

Nathan Cliff Heard was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Nathan E. and Gladys Pruitt Heard. Raised by his mother, a blues singer, and his maternal grandmother in a cold-water flat in Newark, Heard dropped out of school at fifteen. From that point through the late 1960s, Heard spent much of his life in reform school and then in the New Jersey state prison at Trenton...