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Book description

I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane as an inmate of a torture chamber behind America's fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time. Iceberg Slim's fiction has caused controversy ever since it first appeared in the late sixties. His first novel, Pimp, was a frank and at times brutal portrayal of his own life in which he gave graphic insights into his twenty year reign as one of Chicago's most successful and streetwise pimps. All his subsequent books (bar this) took the form of fiction but maintained his vivid and uncompromising take on the urban underworld. The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim is a departure from the rest of his work in that it is a collection of essays. They are similarly straight up and honest but are all the more chilling for their total directness. The wisdom gained through a life of serious excess and violence is considerable and in this varied collection of soul-bearing confessions, Iceberg Slim reveals why he has been revered widely as the spokesman of the street. Slim belongs to the knuckleduster-in your-face school of storytelling. Robert Beck (1918-1992), aka Iceberg Slim, is the best known pimp of all time. He grew up in the mean streets of Southside Chicago where he became involved in the underworld that was to shape his life. He eventually left the pimping game after his third stretch in jail and began to write. He wrote seven books, all published by Canongate, the most famous of which is his autobiography Pimp.