Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967)

Iceberg Slim's 1967 memoir: the book every later pimp memoir, rap persona and self-help spin-off is measured against.

Pimp: The Story of My Life is the memoir of Robert Beck, published under the name Iceberg Slim by Holloway House of Los Angeles in 1967. It covers the roughly twenty-five years he spent pimping in Chicago and the Midwest before he left the life in 1961. The current paperback, which Amazon lists, was reissued in 2011 under the Cash Money Content imprint (ISBN 9781451617139).

It got almost no serious reviews on release and sold anyway, through word of mouth, talk radio and non-bookstore outlets. It had sold close to two million copies by 1973. Donald Goines followed Beck into the market he had opened, and a generation of rappers took the book as source material. Ice-T took his stage name from Beck's.

Later literature on this shelf answers to it. Pimpology rewrote the game as rules, and The PIMP Playbook rewrote it as psychology. Scholars since Justin Gifford read the book two ways: as armor against racial confinement, and as a record in which the women exist almost entirely as objects of the author's violence.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Robert Beck (as Iceberg Slim)

BORN
Published 1967 (Holloway House); reissued 2011

STATUS
In print

ERA
1967–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck); Holloway House; Donald Goines; Ice-T

STANDING
Documented