The Literate Pimp: Robert Beck, Iceberg Slim, and Pimping the African American Novel

Abstract

Before the explosion of black cinema’s Blaxploitation era of Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972), and Willie Dynamite (1974), Robert Beck, writing under the pseudonym Iceberg Slim, published Pimp, the Story of My Life (1967) to celebrate and to lament his twenty-four years as a panderer of female flesh. The story of Iceberg Slim’s evolution from a young boy to the most respected and reviled pimp in America intrigued and inspired. Its publication would be a watershed moment in African American literature (popular and otherwise), because it was one of few novels to address the contemporary problem of the urban, impoverished environment from the perspective of the criminal. The work also became a blueprint for success in the black underworld. By doing so, Pimp became the ur-text to an emergent school of African American literature, sometimes relegated to “popular” status, which delineated the black community’s criminality and its underworld, paving the way for writers Donald Goines, Joe Nazel, and later Bishop Don Magic Juan.KeywordsSexual ViolationBlack CommunityAfrican American MaleBlack FamilyGreat MigrationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.