Donald Goines

The Detroit writer who read Iceberg Slim in prison and then wrote sixteen novels for Holloway House in about four years, before he was shot dead in 1974.

Donald Goines was born on December 15, 1936, into a middle-class Black Catholic family that ran a laundry business in Detroit. At fifteen he lied about his age to get into the U.S. Air Force and served during the Korean War, and he came home with a heroin habit. For most of the next fifteen years he was in and out of state and federal prisons, paying for the habit with robbery, larceny, bootleg liquor and pimping, among other hustles.

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The change came at Jackson State Prison in Michigan. In 1969, the literary scholar Kinohi Nishikawa writes, Goines read Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life and Trick Baby and saw a man from the street making a living by writing it down. He had been trying to write Westerns. He switched to what he knew and sent a manuscript to Holloway House, the Los Angeles paperback house that published Iceberg Slim. Dopefiend came out in December 1971. Whoreson, the story of a boy raised by a prostitute mother who grows up to be a pimp, followed in February 1972.

After that he wrote about four books a year: sixteen novels between 1971 and 1975, including Black Gangster, Street Players, White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief, Black Girl Lost, Eldorado Red, Never Die Alone and Daddy Cool. Holloway House's publisher, Bentley Morriss, had him put five of them out under a second name, Al C. Clark, so the books would not compete with each other on the rack. The Al C. Clark books include the four Kenyatta novels about a Black militant leader. His sister said he wrote fast, sometimes a book a month, to stay out of trouble, and that he based his characters on people he knew.

On October 21, 1974, Goines and his common-law wife, Shirley Sailor, were found shot to death in Highland Park, Michigan, after an anonymous tip to police. The killers were never identified and no motive was ever established. Detroit stations CBS Detroit, WDIV and WDET have since covered a documentary team that is re-examining the case.

His books never went out of print. Crime Partners was filmed in 2001 with Ice-T and Snoop Dogg, and Never Die Alone in 2004 with DMX. 2Pac, Nas, AZ, Jadakiss, Ludacris and 50 Cent have all referenced him or his books in their lyrics, and Dopefiend has been taught at Rutgers. For this archive, Goines is the other half of the Holloway House shelf: Iceberg Slim wrote the pimp from the inside as memoir, and Goines wrote the street around him as fiction. Whoreson is the pimp story told from the child's side of it.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Donald Goines; also published as Al C. Clark

BORN
15 December 1936; Detroit, Michigan (one account says Chicago)

STATUS
Killed 21 October 1974, Highland Park, Michigan, aged 37

ERA
1936–1974

ASSOCIATED WITH
Holloway House; Iceberg Slim; Detroit; Jackson State Prison; the Kenyatta novels (as Al C. Clark)

STANDING
Documented