In 1993, decades removed from their heyday as the premier purveyor of Black pulp novels, Holloway House Publishing rolled out a peculiar new marketing campaign around their most celebrated author, Donald Goines. Goines had been dead for 30 years. The advertisements suggested that this author, who was largely dishonored amongst American critics since his death, had been re-born abroad. The advertisements boasted that “France Discovers Goines,” and that, “Donald Goines Powerful Street Novels are Sure Winners in any Language.” Goines’ novels had been acquired by Gallimard Publishing and were translated into French as part of their Série Noire collection. In the shadow of this 30-year belated Francophone renaissance was the fact that Goines had never been critically acclaimed in America. Goines’ iconicity among working class and incarcerated African Americans was concurrent with his marginalization among critics and literati. Indeed, much of America had never “discovered” Goines. This essay asks, what did French readers and critics see in Donald Goines that American literary circles did not? And what do these transnational distinctions say about African American popular fiction in relation to the literary canon?

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