A poet in search of reality finds a world of hookers, street
preachers, blue-collar workers, and small time hoods that changes him
and his outlook
Philadelphia's South Street is a world of contradiction. The
hardscrabble neighborhood is filled with prostitutes and gangsters;
Working stiffs mingle with winos at Lightnin' Ed's bar. But the
streetwalkers are nearing retirement, the gangsters are unemployed, and
a community is thriving in and around a place written off by officials
and politicians as blighted.
Black poet Adlai Stevenson Brown makes his way to South Street in search
of authenticity in the form of a neighborhood to save. But the world of
South Street - beyond its grit and danger - is more than the cultured
young fish out of water ever expected... and a lot more than he can
handle.
PEN/Faulkner Award-winner David Bradley's marvelous debut novel is
riotously funny and keenly insightful in equal measure. South Street
is a magnificent evocation not only of a vanished time, but of an
American archetype in Adlai - a man in search of someone to save,
unaware that he himself may need saving.
