Holloway House and the rise of Black urban literature By Lee Linn
W
hile the Harlem Renaissance in the first third of the twentieth is considered a golden age in African American culture, including literature, music, stage performance and art, by the mid 1960s another Black literary phenomenon had surfaced, paperbacks aimed at a Black Bentley Morriss working class market, featuring hit men and detectives, pimps and prostitutes, drug dealers and addicts, coming not out of Harlem but Chicago and Detroit, and published by the Los Angeles publisher, Holloway House. These Holloway House first editions are now a significant collecting genre, sought by private collectors and university libraries alike. Founded in 1959 in Los Angeles by Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock, Holloway House first published an eclectic mix of high-and low-brow material, including skin magazines Adam and Knight, biographies about Jayne Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway, and the literature of Casanova and the Marquis de Sade.
