Becoming Richard Pryor

Becoming Richard Pryor is the product of a decade's worth of research by a serious academic and Harper's Magazine contributor Scott Saul. Saul pins down just what was fact and what fiction, tracing Pryor's life from childhood until 1974, just as Pryor's career began to take off. It's a book for people that want to understand Pryor's comedy, and sense of himself--not just what happened in his life, or who his friends were (though you get that, too).

There's no shortage of people who care intensely for Richard Pryor, people to whom Pryor's comedy became a window through which to view the world around them, wherever they were in the 70s. Those who loved Pryor during his heyday formed an intimate bond with him as an artist. They felt as teenagers in the 60s felt about the Beatles, that they were coming of age with Pryor and through Pryor; that he was their guide into experiences they might not have the courage to explore on their own. And because he confessed so disarmingly to things that would have shamed them, they felt they knew him in spirit though not in fact. Becoming Richard Pryor will give them, finally, the chance to know Pryor "in fact" - to know the overlooked particulars of his life and its deeper story--that he was raised in a brothel in Peoria Illinois, by a mother who was a second generation madam. That he saw from an early age the pressures of race, and the frivolity of it. That he moved to Greenwich Village with barely the shirt on his back.

While most comics of the 70s have either become mainstream Hollywood stars (Robin Williams, Steve Martin) or cultural footnotes (Richard Klein, Elayne Boosler), Pryor retains his aura as a fearless black entertainer who could take all the feelings of being an unlovable outsider and package them into the most magnetic act around. He is the unavoidable reference point for comedy in America, even for those who don't know why, exactly: when the Kennedy Center began awarding the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1998, Pryor was the first recipient. No doubt he savored the irony of being recognized by a government that had earlier, through the FBI, targeted him as a public threat. Pryor was perhaps the entertainer who most successfully arried the subversive spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture and then smuggled them into the American mainstream.

Becoming Richard Pryor is a very serious and very thorough account of what made him who he was--to himself and all of us.