The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim

Iceberg Slim’s first three novels (Pimp, Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow) offered some of the rawest and bleakest visions of urban America ever put to paper. Their refusal to compromise, coupled with their reflection of society’s underworld and underbelly, rapidly won him a major following.

The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim, however, proves to be something of a departure in the sense that it is a series of short personal recollections. Make no mistake, the passion, razor-sharp perception and unflinching honesty remains and, if anything, is all the more chilling for its total directness.

The wisdom he gained from a life of serious excess and violence is to be found within this varied collection of soul-bearing confessions that reveal why Iceberg Slim has been revered so widely as the spokesman of the street.

This edition includes an introduction by Iceberg Slim’s widow, Diane Millman Beck.

“I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane as an inmate of a torture chamber behind America’s fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time.”

Iceberg Slim’s fiction has caused controversy ever since it first appeared in the late sixties. His first novel, Pimp, was a frank and at times brutal portrayal of his own life in which he gave graphic insights into his twenty year reign as one of Chicago’s most successful and streetwise pimps.
All his subsequent books (bar this) took the form of fiction but maintained his vivid and uncompromising take on the urban underworld.

The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim is a departure from the rest of his work in that it is a collection of essays. They are similarly straight up and honest but are all the more chilling for their total directness. The wisdom gained through a life of serious excess and violence is considerable and in this varied collection of soul-bearing confessions, Iceberg Slim reveals why he has been revered widely as the spokesman of the street.