Articles & Interviews

The Ex-Pimp Who Remade Black Culture

By the time that Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck died on the night of the Rodney King Riots in 1992, he had sold six million copies of his books, making him one of America’s bestselling black authors. The author of the gritty memoir of his days as a Chicago pimp, Pimp: The Story of My Life, Beck influenced street literature, blaxploitation film, and hip hop in immeasurable ways. Justin Gifford recounts Beck’s breathtaking and tragic life here, and his tells of his own ten year journey to uncover the truth of the man behind the name Iceberg Slim.

“Harvard in Hell”: Holloway House Publishing Company, Players Magazine, and the Invention of Black Mass-Market Erotica

In the late 1960s, Holloway House Publishing Company, a niche publisher of adult magazines and erotic paperbacks, emerged as an unexpected center of black literary production. Founded in 1959 by two Hollywood publicists, Ralph Weinstock and Bentley Morriss, Holloway House in its early years published an eclectic mix of high- and low-brow materials, including skin magazines Adam and Knight, biographies about Jayne Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway, and the literature of Casanova and the Marquis de Sade. However, following the Watts uprising of 1965, Morriss and Weinstock changed the direction of the Los Angeles-based company by publishing mass-market paperbacks targeted specifically toward black working-class consumers.

“Something Like a Harlem Renaissance West”: Black Popular Fiction, Self-Publishing, and the Origins of Street Literature: Interviews with Dr. Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the popularity of self-published street literature (also known as urban literature, ghetto fiction, and hip-hop literature) has exploded among African American readers. Starting with the publication of titles such as Teri Woods’s True to the Game (1998), Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), Vickie M. Stringer’s Let That Be the Reason (2001), and Nikki Turner’s A Hustler’s Wife (2003), street literature has emerged as a driving force in the African American publishing industry.

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street”: Urban Renewal and the Reinvention of American Detective Literature in Chester Himes’s Run Man Run

In examining Chester Himes’s long-ignored Run Man Run (1959), Justin Gifford argues for a re-evaluation of Himes as an innovator of the detective novel. Exploring how Run Man Run engages postwar urban planning policies, the author shows how Himes was the first of many twentieth-century black novelists who mobilized the crime novel to expose the racial ideologies underwriting “urban renewal.”