Richard Pryor’s Peoria, a companion website to Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014), has been named one of Slate’s most compelling digital history exhibits and archives for 2014. Saul, an Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s English Department, collaborated with UC Berkeley’s D-Lab and Stanford’s Spatial History Project, to take a digital, interactive approach to the work of biography.
Slate writes:
“Richard Pryor’s Peoria is a companion site to Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor, a new biography of the comedian’s early years, the earliest of which were spent in the town once known as “Roarin’ Peoria” for “its stubborn resistance to moral reform.” Newspaper articles, photographs, and documents track Pryor’s schooling, the fate of his family’s various businesses in the town’s red light district, and the local racial conflicts that shaped his point of view. It’s a biography of a performer, but also a local history of a small city sharply divided by race, class, and struggles over respectability in the middle of the 20th century.”