The book Rosebudd the American Pimp is about the choices one has to make in order to go to the highest plateau in that lifestyle. Rosebudd did all that was in his power to become a legend. His day to day activities and mental savvy and toughness is displayed throughout the book. His book is not a book on how to become a pimp, but rather a book on how not to be a brutal, uncaring person and still receive the rewards of being one of the best pimps there ever was. In his book he has listed the 27 rules to becoming a master at this game. If you pick this book up, you will not put it down until you are completed. You must be cautious with this material, because you will be handling dope.

“[In Pimp], Iceberg Slim breaks down some of the coldest, capitalist concepts I’ve ever heard in my life.” —Dave Chappelle, from his Nextflix special The Bird Revelation Pimp sent shockwaves throughout the literary world when it published in 1969. Iceberg Slim’s autobiographical novel offered readers a never-before-seen account of the sex trade, and an unforgettable look at the mores of Chicago’s street life during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. In the preface, Slim says it best, “In this book, I will take you, the reader, with me into the secret inner world of the pimp.” An immersive experience unlike anything before it, Pimp would go on to sell millions of copies, with translations throughout the world. And it would have a profound impact upon generations of writers, entertainers, and filmmakers, making it the classic hustler’s tale that never seems to go out of style.

Vinnie Mac grew up in the streets as a nickel-and-dime hustler. He left his hometown of Long Beach and went to Job Corps in Utah. That trip would change his life forever. Vinnie, having his first baby at seventeen years old, went to Job Corps to finish his last year of high school and learn a trade. He became a cook; in the meantime, his first love and his baby momma couldn't stand him being gone, and she found herself another man. Vinnie decided to become a pimp. Through trial and error, he built his stable with some of the baddest bitches and became one of the biggest pimps on the West Coast. This novel takes a look into the secret world of a West Coast player and his team of prostitutes. American Pimps: The Vinnie Mac Story is an explosive urban tale from the streets of Long Beach, California, the home of gamblers, hustlers, players, pimps, and gangbangers. The streets will eat you alive if you don't watch your back! It's about sex, drugs, money, cars, clothes, and jewelry. Vinnie's living the good life on top of the world until it turned into jealousy, deceit, envy, and then murder, then payback.

"Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer," promised the cover of Run Man Run, Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre. He evaluates the artistic and symbolic representations of pimps, sex-workers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries in African American crime literature-characters looking to escape the racial containment of prisons and the ghetto. Gifford also explores the struggles of these black writers in the literary marketplace, from the era of white-owned publishing houses like Holloway House-that fed books and magazines like Players to eager black readers-to the contemporary crop of African American women writers reclaiming the genre as their own.

Publisher description

This volume is a compilation of new original qualitative and ethnographic research on pimps and other third party facilitators of commercial sex from the developed and developing world. From African-American pimps in the United States and Eastern European migrants in Germany to Brazilian cafetãos and cafetinas this volume features the lives and voices of the men and women who enable diverse and culturally distinct sex markets around the world. In scholarly, popular, and policy-making discourses, such individuals are typically viewed as larger-than-life hustlers, violent predators, and brutal exploiters. However, there is actually very little empirical research-based knowledge about how pimps and third party facilitators actually live, labor, and make meaning in their everyday lives. Nearly all previous knowledge derives from hearsay and post-hoc reporting from ex-sex-workers, customers, police and government agents, neighbors, and self-aggrandizing fictionalized memoirs. This volume is the first published compilation of empirically researched data and analysis about pimps and third parties working in the sex trade across the globe. Situated in an age of highly punitive and ubiquitous global anti-trafficking law, it challenges highly charged public policy stereotypes that conflate pimping and sex trafficking, in order to understand the lived experience of pimps and the men and women whose work they facilitate.

Originally published in 1973, "Black Players" was the first book to undertake a thorough examination of the urban pimp culture. Social anthropologists Richard and Christina Milner were allowed access to the secretive and controversial world of pimps and prostitutes, and allowed the players to describe themselves, and the rules of the game in their own words.

Star Parker tells the inspirational story of how she turned her life around from a world of drugs, crime, and welfare to success as an entrepreneur, founder of the Coalition on Urban Affairs, and spokesperson for African-American conservatives. Reprint.

The first and definitive biography of one of America's bestselling, notorious, and influential writers of the twentieth century: Iceberg Slim, né Robert Beck, author of the multimillion-copy memoir Pimp and such equally popular novels as Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. From a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of "street lit" masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of "blaxploitation" culture. You can't understand contemporary black (and even American) culture without reckoning with Iceberg Slim and his many acolytes and imitators. Literature professor Justin Gifford has been researching the life and work of Robert Beck for a decade, culminating in Street Poison, a colorful and compassionate biography of one of the most complicated figures in twentieth-century literature. Drawing on a wealth of archival material—including FBI files, prison records, and interviews with Beck, his wife, and his daughters—Gifford explores the sexual trauma and racial violence Beck endured that led to his reinvention as Iceberg Slim, one of America's most infamous pimps of the 1940s and '50s. From pimping to penning his profoundly influential confessional autobiography, Pimp, to his involvement in radical politics, Gifford's biography illuminates the life and works of one of American literature's most unique renegades.