Introduction
If you are reading this book, you are probably not a slum dweller. That is a fact so elementary that it may seem unnecessary even to state... but think about it for a few moments. The apparent paradox contains some profound implications.
Since you are reading this book, you undoubtedly could afford to pay for it. Equally undoubtedly, it probably rarely if ever occurs to you that there are many people in this country who can never afford to buy any book. What to you is an everyday purchase would be to them an unheard-of luxury.
Simply stated, most of the people this book is actually about could not possibly afford to buy and read it.
There have been many great novels about life in the slums (or, as today's popular euphemism would have it, the "inner cities"). To mention Charles Dickens' Olive Twist, James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan and others, and George Orwell's shatteringly powerful Down and Out in Paris and London is merely to skim the surface. These and many other writers have attempted to "tell it like it is"-and have produced masterpieces. But in spite of their efforts, and the pioneering work of such nonfiction researchers and writers as Studs Terkel, a general ignorance of what it is actually like to live in the slum areas of a major American city prevails.
As publishers of Dansk Blue Books, we do not think it unfair to compare Harry Oakland's The Shamed Socialite with the classics already mentioned. Harry Oakland has lived in the slums of New York and Chicago; he has witnessed shocking incidents of rape, mugging, prostitution, abandoned families, gang warfare and other things almost too ugly to describe. He has seen, over and over again, that where even the most basic necessities of life have to be savagely fought for and fiercely protected, such items as sex exist on the most primitive possible level and the mere idea of such emotions as love rarely occurs to anyone.
The Shamed Socialite is the story of Trish Lovejoy, a seventeen-year-old girl who has had her full share of parental love as well as a great wealth of material possessions. With all this, Trish lacks one thing, and knows it: a knowledge of the lives of people who are poorer than she is on an ordinary, day-to-day level. Trish, like most of us, has a vague awareness of the needs of our impoverished citizens. What she does not realize is that poverty does not merely deprive those citizens of pleasant luxuries; it actually becomes a grinding-down process that produces people who are little better than animals in their basic drives.
Trish begins by bluntly informing her wealthy and socially prominent parents that she is rejecting their upper-class world because she believes it is aimless and hypocritical. She moves from her Park Avenue home to the ghetto district. She sincerely thinks she is going to help the less fortunate whom she considers the "real" people of the world. And once there, her great beauty, dedication and obvious refinement make her an alluring and natural target for a great diversity of ghetto characters.
Trish meets the greediest of political bosses, a man who turns the noblest of motives to his own power-hungry advantage. She meets the black activist who does not know where his own actions will lead him, but only feels that he has been wrongfully hurt and wants to exact his revenge on the entire white race. She meets those who ache desperately for the next crumb of bread life will toss their way, and those who strive desperately for any form of recognition as simple human beings. And she meets sex in its rawest form.
The Shamed Socialite is not exactly a pleasant book to read. Many of its incidents are sordid, some are frightening-and all should make those of us who are reasonably well off feel a twinge of guilt. And because the residents of the ghetto take sex as they find it on the most elemental level, some readers will find it a shockingly "sexy" book. But if it is sordid, frightening, or sexy, it is so only because Harry Oakland is an uncompromisingly honest writer, and he has set down here in fiction form the facts of life as he has found them in his long, painstaking, and sometimes dangerous research in ghetto conditions.
Certainly Trish Lovejoy's stay in the ghetto teaches her a lot about sex and a lot about life in general. She does not succeed in everything she sets out to accomplish, but she emerges from her experiences a much more mature person and a complete woman instead of an overly imaginative girl. She has learned a great deal ... and it is our sincere hope that the reader, too, will learn, and gain useful new insights, from reading about her adventures.
One day in the future, perhaps, the slums will vanish, and better living conditions will be available to everyone. In the meantime, we present The Shamed Socialite as a means of enlightenment and a message of hope.
The Publishers