A major biography—intimate, gripping, revelatory—of an artist who revolutionized American comedy. Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family’s brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he’d known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career—Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar—flowed directly out of his spirit of creative improvisation. The major studios considered him dangerous. Audiences felt plugged directly into the socket of life. Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research—interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts—Scott Saul traces Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s. Becoming Richard Pryor illuminates an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy. It reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still.

Provides a rare glimpse into the life of an outrageously human, fearlessly black, openly angry and profanely outspoken comedic genius whose humble beginnings as the child of a prostitute helped shaped him into one of the most influential and outstanding performers of our time.

Pryor tells the story of his life, from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through his growth as a comedian, to his battle with addiction and, in later years, multiple sclerosis.

The loving, witty, yet brutally honest memoir of the daughter of comedy legend Richard Pryor. Rain Pryor was born in the idealistic, free-love 1960s. Her mother was a Jewish go-go dancer who wanted a tribe of rainbow children. Rain’s father was Richard Pryor, perhaps the most compelling and brilliant comedian of his era, a man whose self-destructiveness was as legendary as his groundbreaking comedy. Jokes My Father Never Taught Me is an intimate, harrowing, poignant, and often hilarious memoir that explores the divided heritage and the forces that shaped a wildly schizophrenic childhood. It is the story of a girl who grew up adoring her father even as she feared him—and feared for him, as his drug problems got worse. Both lovingly told and painfully frank, it is an unprecedented look at the life of a comedy icon, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the tortured man within. Praise for Jokes My Father Never Taught Me “Rain Pryor pulls no punches . . . Using the same profanity-laced wit her father perfected, she unspools darkly comic stories . . . but never devolves into self-pity or bitterness.” —Entertainment Weekly “Vital, entertaining and appalling, Pryor has fleshed out a familiar dysfunctional family refrain—”It was a lot easier to love him if you didn’t know him”—with bravery and wit.” —Publishers Weekly

"This anthology captures the spirit, zest, and cultural impact of Pryor's complex artistry."--Back cover.

In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz--and American--history.

Traces the life of the popular Black comedian, from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois, to his work on the nightclub circuit, and his eventual success in movies and television