New Criticals


To consider another example, one that explicitly collapses the boundaries between fiction and reality—as many of The Wire's fans know, "Snoop" (Felicia Pearson) was actually born and raised in East Baltimore, a drug dealer, and a convicted murderer who served five years in prison. In a recent article in Rolling Stone featuring Pearson (who was convicted in 2011 on drug charges), Ben Wallace-Wells describes Snoop:

Her early life was imbued with near total deprivation: She was born cross-eyed because of her mother's addiction to crack, fed with an eyedropper by her foster grandmother, stripped and locked naked in a closet at the age of five so her mother could sell her clothes for drugs…By the time she was 14, the street were so much a surrogate parent that she called the drug dealer she worked for Uncle and the kingpin he worked for Father.