Omar Tyree brings a double perspective to the craft of writing--that of his own upbringing in one of the most prominent urban American centers, and that of years of watching young African American men self-destruct from the pressures of the street. These experiences provided fertile ground for his imagination and influenced his literary career, which began in the 1990s. The weight of his observations from his personal perspective prompted him to write Flyy Girl (1993), his best-selling novel about a young black woman coming of age in Philadelphia during the materialistic 1980s. In Capital City: The Chronicles of a D.C. Underworld (1994) Tyree merges both cultural perspectives into a fully developed aesthetic vision that establishes his distinct position in the African American literary renaissance genre he terms Urban American Life Novels. These novels offer readers a mature, serious, and purposeful meditation on those issues that plague America's inner cities...