Refashioning himself as an old ex-crook turned revolutionary, he wrote “Pimp” as an act of redemption. But Iceberg Slim was born circa 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X and the uprising in Watts. Robert Moppins, Jr., was born in Chicago to Mary Brown and Robert Moppins in 1918, reborn as Cavanaugh Slim in the streets of Milwaukee in the nineteen-thirties, and reborn again, as Robert Beck, in Los Angeles in 1963, when he chose to honor his mother by taking her late husband’s last name. The great story in “Street Poison” is not about the making of a pimp but about the making of a writer and self-styled political prophet. Having conned, cajoled, and terrorized his way through the underworld, Beck ironically proved to be a perfect mark for Holloway House, his longtime publisher, whose miniscule royalty checks never matched their extraordinary sales figures. of 175 was false, and that “Iceberg” was just a nom de plume_ _that Beck invented while writing “Pimp” (his actual street name was Cavanaugh Slim). We learn that Beck’s oft-quoted claim of having an I.Q. The new book “Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim,” by Justin Gifford, is an exercise in demystification. As I write this, “Pimp” is the number-one best-seller on Amazon in the category “ Philosophy of Good & Evil,” beating out “The End of Faith,” by the less colorful writer Sam Harris. In 2012, Ice T and Jorge Hinojosa produced the entertaining and revealing documentary “Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp,” which both celebrated and humanized its subject. Sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists of the ghetto had granted “Pimp” a certain ethnographic authority when it first appeared after hip-hop became a subject of academic study, Beck's work returned to the ivory tower, appearing in cultural-studies courses and literary journals (and in Peter Muckley’s 2003 book, “Iceberg Slim: The Life as Art”). Before his death in 1992, Beck had become an inspiration and éminence grise for gangsta rap. He launched a new form of crime fiction, with the late Donald Goines becoming his best-known protégé. During the nineteen-seventies, Beck published three more novels and a collection of political essays, recorded a spoken-word LP, was profiled in magazines and newspapers, and became a bona-fide L.A. Iceberg Slim, whose legal name was Robert Beck, burst on to the scene nearly half a century ago, with his memoir “Pimp: The Story of My Life” (1967), followed immediately by the novel “Trick Baby” (1967), which was adapted for the screen by Universal Pictures. The notion that his books circulate only in the urban ghetto’s literary underground is laughable. I’m always amazed when I encounter well-read people unfamiliar with Iceberg Slim. Instead, he catapulted the pimp into America’s pop-culture pantheon of heroes and outlaws. The writer and self-styled political prophet Iceberg Slim meant to fuel the black revolution.
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