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'The Picasso of our profession,' heralded Jerry Seinfeld.

'The funniest comedian of all time,' Mel Brooks declared, funnier than Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton,and Harpo Marx.

But as bright as Richard Pryor's star shone, the revolutionary stand-up comedian never escaped the childhood demons that caused anxiety, fury, self-loathing and a craving for sex and power, reveals Scott Saul in his definitive new biography, Becoming Richard Pryor, published by Harper on December 9. Saul is an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Comic genius:  Mel Brooks called Richard Pryor 'the funniest comedian of all time,' funnier than Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harpo Marx. But Pryor's humor was fed by the demons that haunted his life

Richard, at age eleven and in the sixth grade, ready for a trip to Springfield, Illinois to see his mother.  Pryor described his all too brief days there as the happiest days of his life away from the brothel

A Pryor family photo taken in 1945 in the kitchen of the Famous Door, a tavern close to the brothel where Richard grew up. Anyone looking for action at the tavern were quickly shown the nearby whorehouse. Front row: Gertrude Thomas Pryor (Richard's mother), Dee Pryor. Top row from left: unidentified woman and man, Marie Carter Bryant, Dickie Pryor, LeRoy 'Buck' Pryor (Richard's father). It was in the tavern and the brothel that Richard learned the salty talk that he later mimicked in his standup

Raised by his father, Buck, and grandmother, Marie, who ran a brothel in the impoverished and rough red light district of Peoria, Illinois in the 1940s, Richard emerged from it with a bottom-dog outlook on the world, just like his grandmother who had once been a bootlegger.

His own mother, Gertrude Thomas, was around only briefly. She had come to the brothel as a prostitute before sleeping with Buck and finding herself pregnant. The couple married but Gertrude didn't stay around long.

Buck's love for Gertrude was tangled up in violence – and this was the enduring message that Richard absorbed at home.Gertrude was capable of throwing a few punches herself, drank too much and disappeared for six months at a time. If she didn't leave, Buck said he probably would have killed her.

Marie took over 'matronly' duties and 'made it her job to scare the s*** out of people', Pryor said.

'At least Gertrude didn't flush me down the toilet as some did. When I was a kid, I found a baby in a shoebox – dead. An accident to some, I was luckier than others, and that was the way it was.'

Buck never let Richard forget that he was being raised within the family unlike Buck's other four children by four different women.

'I got my bizarre sense of humor from the fact that I was scared,' Richard said.

In this 'sinkhole of mid-western vice', Marie had transformed herself into a force of nature when she became a madam in the city's red-light district. Her motto was: 'Don't mess with my money.'

Six feet tall and 200 lbs.,Marie took no guff from anyone. When she punished Richard, it was with an old douche bag that smelled of vinegar.

The family together after the death of Buck's next wife, Ann, who married Buck after his divorce from Richard's mother, Gertrude in 1968. Richard visited Peoria with blonde Shelley Bonis, a comedy writer and dancer from Brooklyn, who he married in 1968

Richard Pryor with former girlfriend, Patricia Heitman, at the NAACP Image Awards dinner in 1974. Pryor had a tempestuous relationship with Heitman, who was a longtime stewardess for Pan American Airlines and living in Sausalito when she met Richard at Berkeley

'She kept order in her establishments by threatening to pull out a straight razor she reportedly stashed in her bra.

'The riddle of Richard Pryor's personality beings with the story of Marie,' writes Scott Saul.

He endured beatings by both Marie and Buck, never knowing when Buck was going to detonate in his presence and throw a punch that would knock him out cold.

Richard had no friends growing up and no one to talk to in this black underworld where there was no chance for a childhood.

The sordid life around him turned him into a cynic with a romantic yearning for something better, someone to love him tenderly.

At six years old, he was playing by himself in an alley when an older boy appeared and slammed Richard into a darkened corner.

'I should've run. But I didn't. I was a little chickens***'.

The teen unzipped his pants and made Richard give him oral sex.

Richard felt 'dirty, humiliated and ashamed'. He would never forget that incident and kept his secret for five decades.

The big escape for the boy was the movies and Saturday matinees where he sometimes watched twenty-five cartoons in one sitting.

All his celluloid heroes were loners like Lash LaRue, a cowboy movie star of the 1940s and 1950s, John Wayne, Tarzan, Red Skelton, who played the comic fool, and Jerry Lewis. On television, he avidly watched the comic actor and writer Sid Caesar.

Pryor attends the world premiere of Silver Streak in New York City in 1976

Comedian Richard Pryor toasts his wife Deborah McGuire on their wedding day in 1977. They divorced the next year

A lousy student, in elementary school with Cs in reading, writing, English, and Ds and Fs in everything else, his first grade teacher noted in the record: 'Apparently unstable emotionally.'

He was held back a year and went to live briefly with his mother Gertrude and her family outside of Springfield, Illinois – the period before the divorce was final.

'The farm was paradise, a playground where my imagination could go wild. At night, I listened to crickets instead of creaking beds and moans, and in the morning, I woke to the sound of roosters crowing and the smell of hot biscuits and fresh-brewed coffee'.

'It was a slice of heaven. He called this interlude the happiest time of his life'. 

At sixteen Pryor got a girl pregnant in 1956. Hungry for love but not ready to be a father, he took the route Buck had always taken. The girl had the baby and Richard kept his distance.

Richard was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1959, eager to collect a steady paycheck.

Basic combat training 'really blew my mind because I thought the Army was things like hunting, camping, a little fishing' – summer camp with guns.

He was shipped out to Germany but suffering from a multitude of infirmities like motion sickness vision problems, depression, nerves, his job assignment was plumber.

'Once again I was covered in s***', he said.

It was a rude awakening to discover that he arrived in Germany right after a violent race riot between black and white soldiers.

Pryor and actress Pam Grier attend the 19th Annual Grammy Awards at The Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California

Hearing the 'N'-word often, he thought he was losing his mind and had recurring nightmares. The army hospital said it was normal so Pryor tried coping by smoking and eating.

He was discharged one year later and headed back to Peoria, working his comedy routine in bars and clubs, he fell in love with Patricia Watts, who dreamed of being a mortician.

'Dead people never hurt you', she often said.

They married when she learned she was pregnant but it was the first of seven marriages for Pryor and ended eighty days after their wedding.

In a local comedy club, Richard was introduced to marijuana and amphetamines and was soon  hooked.

They 'eased my pain and insecurity, erased the fear, turned me into a whole new man'. He doubled the dose of the uppers and by the third day was hearing an Indian playing a drum inside of him – his heart.

Buck threw him out of the house when Richard seriously beat up a whore when she asked him to hit her as a sexual tease.

He didn't get the tease angle.

He set out on what was dubbed the 'Chitlin Circuit' in the fall of 1962 looking for work in showplaces in black communities, entertaining between floor shows and R&B music shows.

Living from hand to mouth, hitchhiking and hoping for work and a good meal, he headed to New York.

Bill Cosby was working a successful standup routine in Greenwich Village. 'Goddamn it. This n***** is doing what I'm fixing to do. I want to be the only n*****', Pryor said.

He fixated on Cosby, adopting his mannerisms until he was told he was going to be bigger and better than Cosby.

'Unlike Cos, Richard never took on an air of unqualified success; he was forever an underdog, and had all the anxiety and embattlement that followed that fate', writes the author.

Richard hamming it up in a crucifixion pose for an album's cover shoot in 1968. He satirized America's perception of itself and that of African-Americans in an uncompromising examination of race relations his entire career

Pryor poses as a native on the American plains for his first live album recorded at the Troubadour in West Hollywood in 1968

In Greenwich Village, he tried every drug – from grass, to codeine, nitrous oxide and cocaine.

Sampling freedoms for the first time, he also felt the freedom to date white women and fell for Maxine Silverman who looked like Audrey Hepburn.

She saw him as a Lenny Bruce wannabe. She was 'the cutest white girl I'd ever seen' who also treated life like a party.

But the relationship dissolved into brutal, knock-down, drag-out fights exacerbated by Richard's cocaine abuse.

He discovered LSD and became completely unhinged but he was finding work and ventured out to Los Angeles with Maxine by his side.

She became pregnant and he spent his time haunting nightclubs, gambling with friends and doing drugs, snorting as much as two hundred dollars worth of cocaine habit a day.

His sensitivity to racial prejudice and his combustible temper exacerbated by the drugs led him to lunge at a hotel manager with a knife and pull a gun on his own manager, Bobby Roberts at Reprise Records, and pistol whip him.

That ended that business relationship and Maxine gave up on him as well.

Shelley Bonis, a professional dancer on the show, Hollywood a Go-Go, was his next white girlfriend and they walked down the aisle in Las Vegas.

When he failed to pick her up at the hospital after giving birth to a baby girl they named Rain in 1969, she found him at home in bed with the housekeeper.

His work and life was obscured by his consumption of Courvoisier and cocaine. Shelley filed for divorce.

Pryor fixated on Bill Cosby, who  was working a successful standup routine in Greenwich Village. 'Goddamn it. This n***** is doing what I'm fixing to do. I want to be the only n*****', Pryor said

It was a pattern he never escaped.

He had fallen so far into the black hole of his addictions - women, marriages, affairs, drugs - he couldn't see the devastation he was creating.

Studios became hostile towards him. 'He was a known sniffer.'

Warner Brothers wouldn't touch him to star in Blazing Saddles, a movie he had written, after news of a coke-fueled crackup on location for The Mack traveled back to executive offices. He held up production for days.

He developed a close relationship with comedienne Lily Tomlin and declared they were creative soul mates. But when she talked as a feminist about the prerogatives of women at dinner one night, he turned the table over and stormed out. 

Success still came to him and his comedy album hit number one on Bilboard's R&B charts in 1974.

His album 'Is It Something I Said?' won a Grammy beating out George Carlin, Lily Tomlin and Monty Python.

He had become radioactive and started carrying a gun to the set.

There was Patricia Heitman whose relationship with Pryor fell into the same pattern. She found him in bed with a prostitute and when she refused to join him, he beat her for 'f****** up my fun'.

She also found him in bed with a swimming instructor and a male editor from Jet magazine.

Pam Grier, who starred with him in Greased Lightning, became his lover and helped him get off of drugs and clean up his life – briefly.

Pryor poses with his wife, Jennifer Lee at the premiere of Spike Lee's new film ' The Original Kings of Comedy' on the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood August 10, 2000. Pryor, who had multiple sclerosis, was honored with MTV Films' Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the entertainment world

But he became competitive with her when she beat him at tennis. Not feeling safe around a former addict, she exited and he fell back into drugs. 

Richard reached a pinnacle of success but never lost his sense of being an underdog. It was ingrained in his soul.

Freebasing cocaine one night in June 1980, while watching on television a Buddhist monk immolate himself in protest to the Vietnam War, Pryor poured hard liquor over his own body and flicked his Bic lighter.

The flames reached up to his head and he bolted out onto the street.

His polyester shirt had melted onto his scorched flesh and was in shock when the ambulance arrived to take him to the burn unit of Sherman Oaks Community Hospital.

Burns covered more than half his body and he spent six weeks in recovery at Hospital. 

In an imaginary conversation with God, he asked God what he wanted him to do. There was no answer so he said, 'I'll show you'.

Six years later, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

By 1991, his life was reduced to his bedroom in a rented mansion in Bel Air, high above the west side of Los Angeles.

Clutching a .357 Magnum, he was afraid to move he was so emaciated and frail.

He asked Jennifer Lee to come back and see him through to the end.

On December 10, 2005, at 65, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul and published by