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The riveting biography of Donald Goines—one of the most authentic Black voices in American fiction—that explores the raw world of the street-smart literary icon and his remarkable legacy in the fifty years since his tragic death.

Born in post-Depression era Detroit to a stable, Catholic, two-parent household, and heir to the family business, Donald Goines was instead drawn to the streets and to the dangerous lure of The Life. No writer would end up capturing it quite like Goines. He knew the hustle intimately: bootlegging, pimping, drugs, prostitutes, gambling, and prison. Inspired by the revolutinary author, Iceberg Slim, Donald drew on his own experiences to drop an astonishing sixteen bestselling novels in three short years, including Whoreson, Dopefiend, Daddy Cool, and Never Die Alone. Ironically, the criminal world that infused Goines’s brilliant, uncompromised, and redemptive outlet would be the same one to finally snuff him out.

In this in-depth and updated biography, culled from personal letters, treatments from unwritten books, photographs, and interviews with family members, Eddie B. Allen, Jr. commerorates not only Goines’s compelling life—from his stint in the Air Force as a teen to his criminal career to cult author status—but Goines’s lasting legacy as well. One that resounds with new generations, many of whom are discovering for the first time that he was a true original.