![]() I used to just dream about being a pimp and having all those sexy women givin ’ me money. So this is what molded my thinking, and I wanted to be a pimp. “They seemed so glamorous and so worldly and so polished and sophisticated. They would come for manicures at his mother ’s beauty shop. ” For Beck, these affluent pimps had everything they were fashionable, smooth-talking, dripping with gold and diamonds, and they drove El Dorados. “But, ” hetoldAnsiuerMe/, “the environment poisoned me, street-poisoned me at an early age. His mother wanted him to become a lawyer. The only people with money in his circle were pimps. ”Street-Poisoned at an Early Age ”īeck returned to the rough South Side of Chicago as a teenager. Still, it seems she was able to provide Beck with some semblance of luxury he once said that his mother helped pave the way for his life as a pimp by pampering him. She was exploited by a series of men who drifted in and out of her life. His mother worked as a maid and operated a beauty shop. Beck spent most of his childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Rockford, Illinois. Somehow, he and his mother managed to survive, moving frequently around the Midwest. ![]() In his books he praised his mother for not leaving him in a dumpster when he was an infant. Robert Beck was born on August 4, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois. He would influence numerous writers, rappers, filmmakers, and criminals over the years. When his first book, Pimp: The Stori of My Life, came out in 1967, it held nothing back. Before he became a writer Beck was a “manager ” of prostitutes, or a pimp for nearly 30 years. At one time he was said to be the best-selling African American novelist ever. (Reviewed from advance uncorrected proof index not seen.Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim, sold more than six million books before he died in 1992. For more evidence, see Shetani’s Sister, a previously unpublished late novel that Beck instructed his wife to keep out of the clutches of Holloway House, which he believed cheated him out of the royalties he earned. The quotations from Slim’s books, interviews, and other writings demonstrate his immense writing talent and verbal flair. ![]() Whether or not you buy Justin Gifford’s claims for his subject’s importance (“more than any other cultural figure of the past fifty years, Beck transformed American culture and black literature” his Pimp: The Story of My Life was “one of the most important pieces of American literature of the twentieth century”), his life makes a captivating story. There’s no question that in his late years he did a great deal of good, sounding a cautionary note for black youth who might be tempted to follow his path. Beck, bad as he was, claimed not to be as evil as other pimps because he didn’t hate his mother quite as much-in fact, by the evidence of this book, he didn’t hate her at all. ![]() ![]() The events of his life are put in historical context, including an interesting tour of the prisons (good and bad) where he was incarcerated and the various inner-city neighborhoods where he practiced his misogynistic profession. The author of the Edgar-nominated Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013) surpasses that excellent work with a thorough, well-documented, and intensely readable account of the life of Robert Beck (1918-1992), the reformed pimp whose writings as Iceberg Slim jump-started the outpouring of African American street literature beginning in the late 1960s, most from the Los Angeles paperback publisher Holloway House. ![]()
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