The Mark Twain of hip-hop: How Iceberg Slim’s “Pimp” changed pop culture
Iceberg Slim is an influential cult writer who many readers have never read. His vivid and relentless autobiography, “Pimp: The Story of My Life,” from 1967, tells of the quarter century the author (born Robert Lee Maupin; he later became Robert Beck) spent running women, both black and white, in several Midwestern cities and often with very little apparent empathy or outward emotion. He also published several novels, including “Trick Baby,” made into a 1972 blaxploitation movie. Slim died in 1992, as the Los Angeles riots raged near his home, at the age of 73.
Scottish writer Irvine Welsh has written that Slim “massively influenced popular culture through music and film. In terms of that influence he’s probably the most dominant writer since Shakespeare.”
Justin Gifford’s “Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim,” has just been released. “Mr. Gifford’s taut biography is important and overdue,” Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, calling the biographer “a dogged researcher who arrives at a somewhat unexpected conclusion: The stories in ‘Pimp’ are mostly true.”
