In 1951, Frankie King of James Madison High was a Brooklyn legend, the youngest basketball player ever to make first-team all city before he withdrew from public life while remaining in and of the city — writing pornography for the mob to pay the rent, ambitious novels in his own voice and then a million-book-selling “cozy cat” series under the pen name Alice Nestleton.
https://feeds.fireside.fm/faqnyc/rss?frankieking
That’s not to mention King’s stint playing quarterback for the football team in Fort Leavenworth’s military prison, beating the future Kareem Abdul-Jabaar in a street pick-up game and much more from the remarkable New York City life of a man who drank and smoked his way through it while going years without looking into a mirror chronicled in the graphic novel “Whatever Happened to Frankie King.”
Archival images of Frankie King c/o Graphic Mundi
Writer Jay Neugeboren and his son, illustrator Eli Neugeboren, join LIT NYC host Harry Siegel to talk about Frankie King’s family story, how it connected with their own family stories, and much more.
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The post LISTEN: ‘The Great Wound’ of a Self-Exiled Brooklyn Basketball Legend appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
