Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"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.
About the Author
Justin D. Gifford is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 “He Jerked His Pistol Free and Fired It at the Pavement”: Chester Himes and the Transformation of American Crime Literature
2 Pimping Fictions: Iceberg Slim and the Invention of Pimp Literature
3 The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Donald Goines, Holloway House Publishing Company, and the Radicalization of Black Crime Literature
4 Black in a White Paradise: Utopias and Imagined Solutions in Black Crime Literature
5 “For He Who Is”: Players Magazine and the Reimagining of the American Pimp
6 The Women of Street Literature: Contemporary Black Crime Fiction and the Rise of the Self-Publishing Marketplace
Notes
Index