Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing
"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.

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Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing
"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.

26.95 In Stock
Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

by Justin Gifford
Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

by Justin Gifford

Paperback(American Literatures Initiative)

$26.95 
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Overview

"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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781439908112
Publisher: Temple University Press
Publication date: 01/25/2013
Edition description: American Literatures Initiative
Pages: 216
Product dimensions: 8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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
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