The writer and self-styled political prophet Iceberg Slim meant to fuel the black revolution. Instead, he catapulted the pimp into America’s pop-culture pantheon of heroes and outlaws. Photograph by John D. Kisch / Separate Cinema Archive / Getty

I’m always amazed when I encounter well-read people unfamiliar with Iceberg Slim. The notion that his books circulate only in the urban ghetto’s literary underground is laughable. Iceberg Slim, whose legal name was Robert Beck, burst on to the scene nearly half a century ago, with his memoir “Pimp: The Story of My Life” (1967), followed immediately by the novel “Trick Baby” (1967), which was adapted for the screen by Universal Pictures. During the nineteen-seventies, Beck published three more novels and a collection of political essays, recorded a spoken-word LP, was profiled in magazines and newspapers, and became a bona-fide L.A. celebrity. He launched a new form of crime fiction, with the late Donald Goines becoming his best-known protégé. Before his death in 1992, Beck had become an inspiration and éminence grise for gangsta rap. Sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists of the ghetto had granted “Pimp” a certain ethnographic authority when it first appeared; after hip-hop became a subject of academic study, Beck's work returned to the ivory tower, appearing in cultural-studies courses and literary journals (and in Peter Muckley’s 2003 book, “Iceberg Slim: The Life as Art”). In 2012, Ice T and Jorge Hinojosa produced the entertaining and revealing documentary “Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp,” which both celebrated and humanized its subject. As I write this, “Pimp” is the number-one best-seller on Amazon in the category “Philosophy of Good & Evil,” beating out “The End of Faith,” by the less colorful writer Sam Harris.

The new book “Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim,” by Justin Gifford, is an exercise in demystification. We learn that Beck’s oft-quoted claim of having an I.Q. of 175 was false, and that “Iceberg” was just a nom de plume_ _that Beck invented while writing “Pimp” (his actual street name was Cavanaugh Slim). Having conned, cajoled, and terrorized his way through the underworld, Beck ironically proved to be a perfect mark for Holloway House, his longtime publisher, whose miniscule royalty checks never matched their extraordinary sales figures. The great story in “Street Poison” is not about the making of a pimp but about the making of a writer and self-styled political prophet. Robert Moppins, Jr., was born in Chicago to Mary Brown and Robert Moppins in 1918, reborn as Cavanaugh Slim in the streets of Milwaukee in the nineteen-thirties, and reborn again, as Robert Beck, in Los Angeles in 1963, when he chose to honor his mother by taking her late husband’s last name. But Iceberg Slim was born circa 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X and the uprising in Watts. Refashioning himself as an old ex-crook turned revolutionary, he wrote “Pimp” as an act of redemption. “Perhaps my remorse for my ghastly life,” he declared in the preface, “will diminish to the degree that within this one book I have been allowed to purge myself. Perhaps one day I can win respect as a constructive human being.” While poverty is what inspired Beck and his common-law wife, Betty, to transmute his dark memories into a book, “Pimp” was also meant to be a contribution to the black revolution. Instead, it catapulted the pimp into American popular culture’s pantheon of celluloid heroes and outlaws.

To be fair, “Pimp” is not responsible for glamorizing pimps. The figure of the pimp has been revered and reviled in African-American culture for more than a century, often through tales, “toasts” (bawdy oral poetry), and song. What Beck did was take the cartoon image of the pimp projected in urban rhymes and strutting street characters and give him flesh, history, and dimension, exposing the dehumanizing brutality of “the game.” And he did so when ghettoes were in revolt and black Americans had become an object of worldwide fascination.

If Beck set out to cast a critical light on pimping, why did young cats turn to his books for advice_ _on how to be better pimps? How could an author whose sales figures topped two million in just a few years have been so radically misunderstood? And why haven’t his other books, especially his political essays, received nearly as much attention as his début? Gifford doesn’t answer these questions, but his revelations about Beck’s political life and personal demons offer some clues. His book helps one to see why Beck could probably never kill the pimp without killing a part of himself, and why, when the fires of rebellion began to peter out, voyeurism and titillation prevailed.

When Beck first decided to write his story, he was working as an exterminator and living in South Los Angeles with a young white woman named Betty Mae Shue, her toddler son, and their newborn daughter. It was Betty who proposed committing Beck’s stories to paper, Betty who found the publisher, and Betty who transcribed and typed Beck’s manuscripts. And it was around this time that the Watts rebellion, in August of 1965, shook Beck to his core. His initial fears for his family’s safety gave way to an appreciation for the new mood in the community. Former gang members joined political organizations like the Sons of Watts and, later, the Black Panther Party. Local youth turned a damaged furniture store into the Watts Happening Coffee House, a hangout for would-be militants, artists, and intellectuals. The radical Jewish screenwriter Budd Schulberg launched the Watts Writers Workshop, which Beck would eventually come to support. Amid a veritable cultural revolution, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” appeared in print, just months after Malcolm’s murder. Beck said that he modelled his own memoir on “The Autobiography,” telling one interviewer, years later, “Malcolm X defined the atrocity that pimpin’ is.”

Beck may also have identified with Malcolm because both men had unresolved conflicts with their mothers. (Malcolm’s mother was institutionalized when he was thirteen.) Beck traced his personal trajectory to two traumatic events: being sexually abused by a babysitter, and being ripped away from a loving, stable stepfather. Both of these things happened, as he saw it, because of choices that his mother made. This produced within Beck an intense hatred of her, which led to a hatred of all women. According to a prison psychiatrist, that hatred drove Beck to pimping. Dogged by recurring nightmares of whipping his mother as if she were a slave, Beck spent much of his time in Leavenworth penitentiary, where he was imprisoned in the mid-nineteen-forties, reading Freud, Jung, and Karl Menninger. Rather than overcoming his feelings, however, he used his new knowledge, after his release, to better subjugate his prostitutes. Then, in 1962, sitting in Chicago’s notorious Cook County jail, on the verge of madness, he realized that freedom from pimping required reconciling with his mother. Upon his release, he raced to Los Angeles so they could spend the rest of her days together.

The potentially radical implications of Beck’s epiphany were blunted, though, by the era’s new, militant masculinity, which was fuelled by direct confrontations with state violence and reinforced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” published, like Malcolm’s autobiography, in 1965. The controversial report blamed black women—or, rather, an entrenched matriarchal culture—for sexual promiscuity, street crime, and the poverty that plagued black communities. Even close readers of “Pimp,” such as the comedian and actor Chris Rock, glibly attribute Beck’s downward spiral to Beck’s mother. But Beck does no such thing; instead, he blames himself for harboring misplaced hatred, and concedes that his road to redemption was paved by his mother’s unconditional love.