9.4 /10 1 Votes
4.4/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date 2 September 1997 Originally published 2 September 1997 Genre True crime | 4.9/5 Barnes & Noble Country United States Publisher Broadway Pages 560 pp OCLC 36857674 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Sociology books Code of the Street: Decency, The End of Ideology & Utopia, Frameworks: Conflict in Balance, Disability and Psycholo, Modern Japan: Origins of | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood is a 1997 book written by Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former Baltimore homicide detective Ed Burns. This book follows the lives of individuals who lived on the corner of Fayette Street and Monroe Street in West Baltimore over one year. It was named Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Contents
Origins
Simon credits his editor John Sterling with the suggestion that he observe a single corner in Baltimore. Simon believes Sterling was expecting a neighborhood story but he knew that "the corner" also had connotations for Baltimore's open-air drug markets. He took a second leave of absence from the Baltimore Sun in 1993 to research the project. The authors eventually spent three years working with the people of the neighborhood.
Plot introduction
The book covers a year in the life of an inner city drug market at Fayette & Monroe Streets in Baltimore. Simon and Burns spent over a year interviewing and following around the people who lived on the Fayette & Monroe corner. Although written like a novel, the book is nonfiction; it uses the real names of those people and recounts actual events.
It revolves mostly around the lives of Gary McCullough, a drug addict, his ex-wife Fran Boyd, also an addict, and their son DeAndre McCullough, a high school student who begins to sell drugs. The book is a look at the effects of drug addiction, the drug trade, and the war on drugs on an urban neighborhood, as well as being an examination of the sociological factors which underlie the modern drug trade.
Subjects
Critical response
Richard Price, author of Clockers and later a co-writer of The Wire with the two authors, said that "The Corner is an intimate, intense dispatch from the broken heart of urban America. It is impossible to read these pages and not feel stunned at the high price, in human potential, in thwarted aspirations, that simple survival on the streets of West Baltimore demands of its citizens. An important document, as devastating as it is lucid." The Seattle Times said that in terms of providing the reader access to the secret world of the urban drug trade the book "transcends There Are No Children Here or Clockers."
Simon has said that he feels the book perplexed readers in terms of its outspokenness on political issues and that liberals were outraged by criticism of welfare and conservatives were appalled at the ennobling of drug dealers and addicts. In the afterword of Homicide, Simon acknowledged that while most of the detectives he accompanied accepted The Corner as legitimate, some saw it as a "betrayal", possibly due to the mention of the extent of police brutality.
However, it is noted in The Corner that this form of brutality was far worse than had taken place during Simon's tenure as a "police intern" i.e. reporter. One such example is where a uniformed officer beats a boy who is in handcuffs, whereas in Homicide the code of honor at the time makes clear that "you don't hit a man who's wearing cuffs or is unable to fight back."
Adaptations
The book was adapted into an Emmy award winning miniseries also called The Corner. Simon served as the show's writer and executive producer. It could also be argued that this book serves as an inspiration for the TV series "The Wire".