In this shocking novel of a young girl alone on the streets, Donald Goines delves into yet another facet of the ghetto experience–the dark, despair-ridden world of a black girl’s soul.

Sandra took to the streets when she was eight years old and tried to fight off the hunger pangs by shoplifting and moving into the profits of drug pushing. Then she met Chink, and with him she discovered love and affection … as well as rape and murder.

The shocking nightmare story of a black heroin addict

Trapped in the festering sore of a major American ghetto, a young man and his girlfriend–both attractive, talented, and full of promise–are inexorably pulled into the living death of the hardcore junkie. It is a horrifying world where addicts will do anything to get their next fix.

For twenty-three years of his young life, Donald Goines lived in the dark, despair-ridden world of the junkie. It started while he was doing military service in Korea and ended with his murder in his late thirties. He had worked up to a hundred-dollars-a-day habit–and out of the agonizing hell came Dopefiend.

From one of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century comes the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today’s street lit and hip-hop culture.

After my ninth birthday, I began to really understand the meaning of my name. I began to understand just what my mother was doing for a living. There was nothing I could do about it, but even had I been able to, I wouldn’t have changed it.

Whoreson Jones is the son of a beautiful black prostitute and an unknown white john. As a child, he’s looked after by his neighborhood’s imposing matriarch, Big Mama, while his mother works. At age twelve, his street education begins when a man named Fast Black schools him in trickology. By thirteen, Whoreson’s a cardsharp. By sixteen, his childhood abruptly ends, and he is a full-fledged pimp, cold-blooded and ruthless, battling to understand and live up to his mother’s words: “First be a man, then be a pimp.”