#Iceberg slim family movie#
Movie projects about Iceberg Slim or his writings have circulated, but the writings have never been considered mainstream. Once a week or so, Gifford said, he meets someone who has read and remembered an Iceberg Slim book. “His books were not sold in bookstores, but in barbershops and liquor stores, and passed around in families.” “His was a shadow career that existed parallel to the literary canon,” Gifford said. Over the coming years, he wrote nearly a dozen books before his death in 1992 in Los Angeles. But in the 1960s, he left that life and wrote his first book, his autobiography, coming up with the Iceberg Slim name. Later, he chose the surname Beck.Īs a young man, Iceberg Slim was a street hustler and a pimp. The man behind the Iceberg Slim persona was born Robert Lee Moppins Jr. Thursday at Sundance Books, 121 California Ave. Gifford will read from “Street Poison” and sign books at 6:30 p.m. “It all added up to create the book,” Gifford said. “I realized he was more than a former pimp and a writer, he was also deeply committed to the Black Panthers and other far-left organizations.”ĭiane Beck gave Gifford more of her husband’s documents and writings and Gifford began to realize Iceberg Slim was a contradictory character - a misogynistic pimp and a writer who was deeply committed to his family. “I bought the clothes and shoes and asked if I could interview her,” Gifford said. There, he came across Diane Beck, Iceberg Slim’s wife who was selling his suits, shoes and other clothes to raise money for a charity. He started searching eBay for anything about Iceberg Slim. Gifford likened the prose to the gangsta rap he listened to growing up. “A lot of the language seemed familiar, particularly Iceberg and the characters he draws, and pimps speaking in rhymes or ‘toasts.’” “Not only was it interesting in terms of where it sits in the landscape of American literature, it seemed to be the precursor to hip-hop,” Gifford said. “It was actually a genre I had never seen before. “I was doing research and I found the book again on a book table in Harlem with other books,” he said. But five years later, he found the “Pimp” bio again on a book sale table in New York City. His books have sold millions of copies and his words and street name have influenced such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, Gifford said.Ī student of American and African-American literature, Gifford forgot about the Iceberg Slim autobiography after that first encounter with the book. “It was so deep in street slang, it was difficult to understand.”īut Iceberg Slim, the street name of Robert Beck, a pimp and ex-con in the 1940s and 1950s, became a remarkable voice in mid-20th century black literature. “It looked like a Harlequin romance novel,” Gifford said of the book. Gifford, now a University of Nevada, Reno English professor and author of the just-released book “Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim,” had never heard of the book or the author. Justin Gifford’s introduction to Iceberg Slim came when some students at the South-side Chicago school where he taught showed him a copy of an autobiography titled “Pimp: The Story of My Life,” published in the 1960s.
0 kommentar(er)
