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unpublished journals, screenplay drafts--Scott Saul traces Pryor's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.
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