Manchild in the Promised Land is an autobiographical novel. It is the testimony of a boy, addicted to the streets in every way imaginable, who became a man who beat all of the odds stacked against him. 
It is a tour of 1940s/1950s Harlem.
And it is social commentary on the southern Black families who migrated north to “The Promised Land” after the Great Depression. 

“The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents- the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. Where does one run to when he’s already in the Promised Land?”