Realism or Fantasy?

"The literary roots for this came from two streams in the 1960s. The highbrow, mainstream literary and leftist types endorsed such nonfiction, black prison literature as The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Eldridge Cleaver’s essay collection Soul on Ice; Poems from Prison, compiled by inmate and poet Etheridge Knight, which includes Knight’s “Ideas of Ancestry,” one of the most famous and highly regarded African-American poems of the 1960s; and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. All of these books have become part of black literary canon and are frequently taught in various college literature, creative writing, and sociology classes. On the pulp, populist fiction side in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the novels of former pimp Iceberg Slim and imprisoned drug addict Donald Goines—including Trick Baby, Dopefiend, Street Players, and Black Gangster. These novels are the direct antecedents of the books that Chiles found so dismaying in 2006. They occupied a small but compelling portion of the black literature output in the 1970s. Many saw them in a far more political light at that time; now these books dominate African-American literature or seem to. Then, as now, there is a strong belief among many blacks—poor, working-class, and bourgeois intellectuals—and many whites, as well, that violent, urban life represents 'authentic' black experience and a true politically dynamic 'resistance' culture."

Gerald Early on America.gov considers the rise of black pulp fiction.