George Cain, Writer of ‘Blueschild Baby,’ Dies at 66

George Cain, a writer whose 1970 novel “Blueschild Baby” was greeted as an important exploration of the black urban experience in the United States but who abruptly disappeared from the literary scene as drugs took over his life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 66.

The cause was complications of dialysis he was receiving for kidney disease, his son, Malik, said.

Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, in a poetic vernacular that draws heavily on street language, Mr. Cain’s autobiographical novel — the hero’s name is George Cain — describes a fevered journey through drug addiction and self-hatred to drug-free redemption. In the process, the hero comes to terms with his identity as a black man in the United States.

In form, the novel echoes classic slave narratives of imprisonment and escape, and their later evolution in memoirs like Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the scholar of black American literature Addison Gayle Jr. called it “the most important work of fiction by an Afro-American since ‘Native Son,’ ” and if other critics took a more measured view, most still regarded it as a promising first outing by a young writer with a compelling voice.

There was no second novel. Instead, Mr. Cain struggled for the rest of his life with a dependence on drugs, primarily heroin, a future foreshadowed in his novel. “We stop at a stand selling all sort of African jewelry and I spot this necklace with a monkey’s head,” the narrator says. “Just like the monkey that haunts me. I buy it and throw it on. He hangs it round my neck and the hunger shall always be a threat.” George Maurice Hopkins was born in Manhattan on Oct. 27, 1943, and grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. His father, an employee with the Department of Labor, ascended the civil service ladder and reached the position of assistant regional manager, a job that allowed him to move the family to a middle-class neighborhood in Teaneck, N.J., soon after George graduated from high school.

A precocious student, George went to public schools but after graduating from junior high school earned a scholarship to the McBurney School, a private academy run by the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York. He attended Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., on a basketball scholarship but left in his junior year to travel to Texas, California and Mexico. In Mexico he spent six months in jail for marijuana possession.

The narrator of “Blueschild Baby” attends a white prep school, where he takes drugs for the first time. After his beloved grandmother dies in a fire at the family’s apartment building, he experiences a crisis.

Unable to bear the burden of expectations imposed by his family and the residents of his Harlem housing project, he turns his back on the bourgeois white world and plunges into the drug underworld, joining, as he puts it, “the dead.”

“George was confused as to which side of his identity he wanted to embrace,” his former wife, Jo Lynne Pool, said. “Did he want to be street or middle class? His parents wanted him to be upwardly mobile, but he still had a lot of friends from the street, and they were going down.”

On returning to the United States in 1966, he settled in Brooklyn and began writing “Blueschild Baby,” adopting the pen name Africa Cain. The surname reflected his fascination, as one of a pair of identical twins, with the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The first name, which he later dropped in favor of George, hinted at a continuing search for identity that led him, at various times, to make common cause with the Black Panthers and to convert, briefly, to Sunni Islam.

This search underlay some of his novel’s most impassioned pages. “Everybody but me had a piece of George Cain,” his alter ego thinks as he is cheered on by the crowd at a basketball game. “Was no longer me; but a composite of all their needs and hopes.”

The book’s success opened up bright prospects for Mr. Cain. On his book tour he met literary celebrities like James Baldwin. Staten Island Community College hired him as a lecturer. He began a second novel, a sequel to “Blueschild Baby.”

Drugs dashed these hopes, and his life unraveled during the 1970s. His wife left, taking their children with her, and the marriage ended in divorce. He lost his job and lived a marginal existence in Brooklyn and, for many years, in Harlem. He produced no more literary work. In 1987, the Ecco Press reissued “Blueschild Baby” in paperback.

In addition to his son, Malik, of Washington, Mr. Cain is survived by two daughters, Nataya Carter of Houston and Sabrina Giral of Manhattan; two brothers, Edmund and Keith, both of Manhattan; a sister, Arlann Walker of Teaneck, N.J.; and five grandchildren.