Over 20 years since his tragic death, the late rapper Tupac Shakur remains in high demand. Plenty of Tupac memorabilia has been auctioned off in the past year. The most amazing being this past Saturday (Oct. 29), a four-page letter handwritten by ‘Pac called “Is Thug Life Dead?” written while he was while incarcerated at Clinton Correctional Facility in 1995 was auctioned off for an whopping $172,750.
The minimum bid for the letter was $10,000. After 31 bids, it was sold for $172,725. Pac addressed the letter to “young black Americans” and sent the letter to Death Row Records employee Nina Bhadreshwar.
In the letter, Pac writes of the three stages of life: “Ours begins with a young DustKicker, a ThugNigga then finally a BossPlaya … Each stage has many obstacles and pleasure, but they are all lethal if not played properly … A regular Playa plays women. A Boss Playa plays life. A Boss Playa is a thinker, a leader, a builder, a moneymaker, a souljah, a teacher and most of all, a Man!”
According to a statement from Goldin Auctions, the company responsible for the sale, the letter was part of a 10-lot Tupac Shakur collection including plaques and contracts, which sold for $206,625 as a whole. Read “Is Thug Life Dead?” in it’s entirety below:
Tupac died in a still-unsolved shooting around a month after writing the letter and the essay was never published.
Sources state that this could be an auction record for any Tupac item.
