Iceberg Slim at Biography Project
The Biography Project has an excellent page devoted to Iceberg Slim, aka Robert Beck, including a biographical profile and several reprinted articles and interviews. Beck was a pimp from age 18 to 42, then went straight and became a writer specializing in portrayals of the criminal underworld he had left.
He published his first autobiographical novel, Pimp: The Story of My Life in 1969 published by Holloway House. He found his book being shelved next to other black authors of the angry 60's like Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice and Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As the climate shifted to the more militant black political movements in the 1970's, Slim had an opportunity to meet Huey Newton and other members of the Black Panther Party, whom he admired greatly. He considered his success as a pimp as a blow against white oppression. The Black Panthers, however, had little mutual regard for Slim, considered his former profession as little more than the exploitation of his people for personal gain.
This site reprints two interesting pieces from the peak of Slim's literary success: (1) a 1972 interview from the Los Angeles Free Press, in which interviewer Helen Koblin both praises Slim as "a strange mosaic of a hideous past, an optimistic present and a prophetic future" and chides his "vaguely condescending attitude toward women" (that "vaguely" is polite); and (2) a 1973 interview from the Washington Post, in which interviewer Hollie West writes, "Iceberg Slim may have done for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief: articulate the thoughts and feelings of someone who's been there."
