Piri Thomas | Memoirist, poet, 83

Piri Thomas, 83, whose 1967 memoir,

Down These Mean Streets

, chronicled his tough childhood in Spanish Harlem and the outlaw years that followed and became a classic portrait of ghetto life, died on Monday at his home in El Cerrito, Calif.

The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Suzie Dod Thomas, said.

The memoir, a best-seller and eventually a staple on high school and college reading lists, appeared as Americans seemed to be awakening to the rough cultures that poverty and racism were breeding in cities. A new literary genre had cropped up to explore those conditions, in books such as Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Down These Mean Streets joined that list. The memoir, Mr. Thomas wrote on his website, had "exploded out of my guts in an outpouring of long suppressed hurts and angers that had boiled over into an ice-cold rage."

In the memoir Mr. Thomas described how he was brought up as the only dark-skinned child among seven children, the son of a Puerto Rican mother, Dolores Montanez, and a Cuban father, Juan Tomas de la Cruz. His dark skin, Mr. Thomas recalled, made him feel like an outlier in his own family and neighborhood, where he was taunted about this looks. Even his father, he felt, preferred his lighter-skinned children.

He described the bravado, or "machismo," that he affected on the streets. Protecting his "rep" led him to "waste" people who insulted him, he wrote. He sniffed "horse" - heroin - even though he knew the consequences.

After the memoir, Mr. Thomas spent much of the rest of his life lecturing about it. He also wrote two novels, Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (1972) and Seven Long Times (1974), several plays, and the collection Stories From El Barrio (1979). He also set his poetry to music.

- N.Y. Times News Service