Down the Meanest Streets

When you are excited about a writer who is still in the start of his career; who is known but whose name is not yet a household word, whose third novel, The Best Friends Story, a trilogy. Penman Thornwell was born in Detroit, Michigan. He has a P.H.D. from the streets of Detroit having hustled as a stick-up man to peddling dope and his marriage in 1977. His firs novel, Down the Meanest Streets (2008), was well received by critics and Whore Stroll (2011) is widely acclaimed. Though he was taken seriously by the critics-being compared to such established writhers as Donald Goines, Roy Glenn, and Terri Woods his first truly popular success was Down the Meanest Streets. The eagerly awaited novel, The Best Friends Story will be published in 2012. Like all of his novels to date, The Best Friends Story is about the experience of young black American males throughout the inner cities-their history and mythology, their contemporary reality, morals, and methods of coping as a visible and exploited minority. Down the Meanest Streets is also about Thornwell, as individual-black male, growing up in the inner city of Detroit, Michigan. It is also about Thornwell s friend Seal -black male, growing up in the inner city of Detroit, Michigan. But as different from Thornwell, in the life he chooses and the values he holds as two people can be. Just as Thornwell is the object of that novel, Down the Meanest Streets, and as it turns out, Thornwell is the subject also. So the author moves form subject to object and toward the end it is the author whose examined life we are closer to. When an interviewer recently asked him to describe what is distinctive about his novels, Penman Thornwell replied, The ability to use the language to tell stories, being a masterful story teller. Down the Meanest Streets, his first and most famous work, a novel that has such extravagant, wide praise that to call it a masterpiece might be an understatement. The novel was wrote when the author was in the penitentiary.