Lee Stringer reads from his book 625k QuickTime movie

Web posted on: Wednesday, July 01, 1998 4:10:47 PM EDT

From CNN Correspondent
Peg Tyre

NEW YORK (CNN) -- In the city of strangers, Lee Stringer shuffled unseen through subway stations and city lock-ups. He's walked down honky tonk streets of New York, for 11 years homeless and addicted to crack.

But Stringer has just been hailed as a new voice in American literature by a great man of letters, Kurt Vonnegut.

"This is a beguiling book," Vonnegut said of Stringer's "Grand Central Winter", an account of his life as a vagrant. "This is a seductive book for anyone."

Vonnegut's remarks came at the party celebrating publication of the book, a poetic and philosophical view of the underbelly of New York.

"Some are solemn, perched silently on the ground with a cardboard sign, or rooted in one spot, methodically shaking a cup," Stringer wrote. "Some press a song or dance on you."

Stringer's success comes through writing and editing the homeless newspaper "The Street News"

Life on the street meant redeeming cans, selling a homeless newspaper called "Street News" and sleeping in the bowels of Grand Central Station at night -- under a stairway or in a crawl space near Track 109.

"I'm glad I'm not down there, but I don't have the kind of blind regret you might think I have," Stringer said.

Stringer climbed out of his hole and off the streets through his writing, which began after he began carrying around a pencil that he used to clean his crack pipe.

One day when he was out of money and drugs, Stringer took the pencil and began writing a story. He sold the story to "Street News" and before long he was writing regularly for the paper. After he became editor of the newspaper his work was "discovered" by an editor of a small press called Seven Stories.

"This guy could really write," said editor Daniel Simon. "Really write."

Writing became a reason for Stringer not to get high.

"I just want to jump in and do it," he said, "that's my temperament. The book was very much like that. I didn't know what I was doing. I just kind of fumbled my way through it."

The book has won raves from critics, and even his old friends are impressed.

Stringer doesn't miss his old life living in the subway, but doesn't regret it, either

When he was a crack addict, Stringer though he knew exactly how his life would end -- dead from drugs or hustling.

"It's really a nightmare, but in the middle of it, it seems like a regular dream," he said.

Stringer is now striving for the writer's life like his idols James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Tennessee Williams -- he is working on his next project.

The fragile tendrils of literary success have changed everything -- his relationship to the police, who were once his adversaries, his relationship to his peers.

Lee Stringer is a changing man walking thorough a changing city. He is writing his life and then, living to rewrite it again.

Related sites:

• Seven Stories Publishing