Pryor Convictions is the autobiography of the most influential comic performer of the past thirty years. Richard Pryor takes us from his childhood and adolescence in the whorehouses, bars, and pool halls of the black section of Peoria, Illinois, through his army service, peripatetic life as a burgeoning comic, ascendance as the most powerful and honest comedian of the 1970s and early 1980s, to the tragic unraveling of his career and diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.