Pimping fictions
Subtitle: African American crime literature and the untold story of Black pulp publishing
By: Justin Gifford
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 205
ISBN-13: 9781439908105; 9781439908112
Subjects: African Americans in literature; Holloway House Publishing Co; Publishing; American Urban fiction; History and criticism; Criticism and interpretation; Crime in literature; American Detective and mystery stories; American Pulp literature; African American authors; American fiction; History
Description: Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Chester Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. He draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre, evaluating the artistic and symbolic representations of pimps, sex-workers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries in African American crime literature.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: He jerked his pistol free and fired it at the pavement : Chester Himes and the transformation of American crime literature; title: Pimping fictions : Iceberg Slim and the invention of pimp literature; title: The revolution will not be televised : Donald Goines, Holloway House Publishing Company, and the radicalization of Black crime literature; title: Black in a white paradise : utopias and imagined solutions in Black crime literature; title: For he who is : Players magazine and the reimagining of the American pimp; title: The women of street literature : contemporary Black crime fiction and the rise of the self-publishing marketplace.