a middle-class family in Detroit, Goines was expected to go into the family's laundry business. Instead, at 15, he falsified his age and joined the Air Force, in which he served from the early to mid 1950's. While enlisted Goines developed a heroin habit that plagued him until he died. For nearly 15 years after leaving the military, he pimped, robbed and gambled to support his addiction, spending several years in and out of prison. A fan of cowboy flicks, he first tried to write books about the Wild West. But after reading Iceberg Slim's autobiography, ''Pimp: The Story of My Life,'' Goines moved from the Wild West to the urban jungle.

Goines' narratives offer a painfully vivid account of a black underworld, now referred to as “the hood”, where fancy cars, crooked cops and dilapidated buildings abound, and whores, corner hustlers, pushers and thieves thrive. It was a world he knew all too well.

Getting up his nerve after leaving prison, Goines traveled to Los Angeles “with his eyes all-aglow wanting to see whether we would be interested in his work,” says Holloway House (a publishing company in Los Angeles that specialized in black pulp fiction) chief executive Bentley Morriss. “The dream that he had was two-fold - one was to get his books- or book at that time, published and for a film to be made of one of his books.” When Goines gave the then chief exec Ralph Weinstock his first novel, “Dopefiend”, “which was, if you’ve read it, an extraordinarily graphic and bizarre tale,” he saw something “extraordinary” about it and assigned an editor to Goines to help polish it. From then on, as an addict driven to support his heroin habit, Goines wrote at a feverish pace, sometimes finishing books in less than a month.

In the genre of pulp fiction, Goines novels are short, vicious and sometimes TOO graphic. ''He was a real storyteller. You read his books and you feel like you're right there,'' said DMX, who, like many Goines fans, discovered him while he himself was incarcerated. Now a hugely popular rap star, producer, and actor, he plays the starring role of King David in Goines first book adapted for the movies, “Never Die Alone”. Director Ernest R. Dickerson, who directed this film after spending many years as Spike Lee's cinematographer, says he shied away from many of the more graphic passages, ''some of it was too much.''

Goines also has influenced an entire new generation of urban writers, who admire Goines directness and unwavering honesty. One of them is Joylynn Jossel, who grew up in the projects in Columbus, Ohio and is now the author of a best selling novel “Dollar Bill”, currently #5 on Essence Magazines best seller list. She says, “Donald Goines book “Black Girl Lost” was the first quote unquote grown-up book I ever read. It belonged to my aunt and I stole it out of her nightstand drawer and took it home with me, and that was when I was 11 years old. I’m now 32 and I still have that book; that is what an impact that book had on me. What Donald Goines put in print was so lifelike, it was so real, so gritty, he didn’t hold back. I really felt that for the first time someone wasn’t afraid to write the truth. That is what inspired me to write.”