Iceberg slim pimp glossary of terms series#

So this is what molded my thinking, and I wanted to be a pimp. “They seemed so glamorous and so worldly and so polished and sophisticated. They would come for manicures at his mother ’s beauty shop. ” For Beck, these affluent pimps had everything they were fashionable, smooth-talking, dripping with gold and diamonds, and they drove El Dorados. “But, ” hetoldAnsiuerMe/, “the environment poisoned me, street-poisoned me at an early age. His mother wanted him to become a lawyer. The only people with money in his circle were pimps. ”Street-Poisoned at an Early Age ”īeck returned to the rough South Side of Chicago as a teenager. Still, it seems she was able to provide Beck with some semblance of luxury he once said that his mother helped pave the way for his life as a pimp by pampering him.

Iceberg slim pimp glossary of terms series#

She was exploited by a series of men who drifted in and out of her life. His mother worked as a maid and operated a beauty shop. Beck spent most of his childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Rockford, Illinois. Somehow, he and his mother managed to survive, moving frequently around the Midwest. In his books he praised his mother for not leaving him in a dumpster when he was an infant. Robert Beck was born on August 4, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois. He would influence numerous writers, rappers, filmmakers, and criminals over the years.

When his first book, Pimp: The Stori of My Life, came out in 1967, it held nothing back.

Before he became a writer Beck was a “manager ” of prostitutes, or a pimp for nearly 30 years. At one time he was said to be the best-selling African American novelist ever. Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim, sold more than six million books before he died in 1992.