Pimp
1967
- pimps
- biography
- african americans
- fiction
- slums
- fiction, general
- african american men
- biography & autobiography / criminals & outlaws
- social science / ethnic studies / african american studies
- philosophy / good & evil
The story
This is the story of Iceberg Slim's life, as he saw, felt, tasted, and smelled it. A trip through hell by the one man who lived to tell the tale. The dangers of jail, addiction and death that are still all too familiar.
What it’s like
Hard, unsparing street prose in the first person, written as a memoir of hustle and survival: a raw, rhythmic voice that reads like someone talking low across a bar table, with slang, sharp cadence and a constant sense of the streets' heat and stink. The world on the page is urban Black America in the 1930s and 40s, rendered through smells, cheap liquor, pool halls, cramped rooms, and the grinding bleakness of the slum, with little relief and no sentimentality. Its mood is grim, watchful and bitterly reflective, the kind of reading that settles in during a long night or a long train ride when you want something that doesn't flinch. The narrator moves from petty crime through prison and addiction toward a hard-won, morally unsettled clarity, so the emotional arc is one of brutal descent and a guarded, late reckoning. Intensity is high: frequent violence, beatings, sexual exploitation of women, drug use, and cruelty, described plainly rather than lurid, with dread and bleakness more than set-piece gore. Not gentle. Written for readers drawn to gritty, voice-driven autobiography and street literature, and to those who want an unvarnished account of a life lived at the margins.
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