Mike Tyson used to visit him for advice. Ice-T and Ice Cube chose their names in his honor. He's had a substantial impact on gangsta rap and black culture. Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck was both the "definitive voice of black urban life" and a "misogynist who wrote trashy paperbacks that promote violence against vulnerable young woman," Justin Gifford (Pimping Fictions) argues in Street Poison, the first-ever biography of the writer. Tall, slender and cool, Slim dressed in flashy clothes, a suitable style for the life described in his popular autobiography, Pimp.
In 1918, Beck was born in Chicago, and his family later moved to Rockford, Ill. He lived a contented middle-class life and did well in school until his mother left her second husband to follow a hustler to Milwaukee, shattering the boy's sense of stability. In 1936, an 18-year-old college dropout, Beck started pimping in the streets and clubs while still living with his mother. In his own words, he was "street poisoned" and very successful; he made a lot of money, abused many of his prostitutes and did prison time.
After his final release in 1962, he gradually transformed himself into an author. Though major publications did not review them and few bookstores carried them, Iceberg Slim's books sold in the millions of copies and had a deep influence on African American writing. Without Slim, Gifford argues, there would be "no street literature, no blaxploitation, no hip-hop the way we know them today." Gifford's biography is as gritty as it is revelatory. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher