Description:Frank, outrageous, profane, incisive, urgent - but above all, possessed
by luminous humor - Pryor takes us from his birth in Peoria, Illinois,
in 1940 and his childhood and adolescence in a family that worked in the
whorehouses, bars, and pool halls of the black section, through his
stint in the army, his peripatetic life as a burgeoning comic, his
achievement of a true comedic persona, his ascendance as the most
powerful and honest comedian of the 1970s and early 1980s, to his years
as a cultural icon - the legendary performances, the movies, the money,
the women, the cocaine addiction, the self-immolation, the six
marriages, the quadruple-bypass surgery, and the diagnosis of multiple
sclerosis.