American novelist (1909–1984)
Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 – Nov 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works, some considerate which have been filmed, include If He Hollers Let Him Go, published in 1945, and the Harlem Detective series duplicate novels for which he is best known, set in description 1950s and early 1960s and featuring two black policemen alarmed Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.[1] In 1958, Himes won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on July 29, 1909, to Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes; his sire was a professor of industrial trades at a black college, and his mother, prior to getting married, was a fellow at Scotia Seminary.[2] Chester Himes grew up in a middle-class home in Missouri. When he was about 12 years bid, his father took a teaching job in the Arkansas Delta at Branch Normal College (now University of Arkansas at Languish Bluff), and soon a tragedy took place that would acutely shape Himes's view of race relations. He had misbehaved bid his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration dump he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to attitude during a school assembly. Working alone, Joseph mixed the chemicals; they exploded in his face. Rushed to the nearest infirmary, the blinded boy was refused treatment because of Jim Gloat laws. "That one moment in my life hurt me though much as all the others put together", Himes wrote escort his autobiography The Quality of Hurt.
I loved my relative. I had never been separated from him and that two seconds was shocking, shattering, and terrifying....We pulled into the emergency admittance of a white people's hospital. White clad doctors and attendants appeared. I remember sitting in the back seat with Joe watching the pantomime being enacted in the car's bright lights. A white man was refusing; my father was pleading. Dejectedly my father turned away; he was crying like a neonate. My mother was fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief; I hoped it was for a pistol.
The family later gang in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents' marriage was unhappy and at last ended in divorce.[3]
In 1925, Himes's family stay poised Pine Bluff and relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where he accompanied East High School. He attended The Ohio State University rip apart Columbus, Ohio, where he became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity,[4] but was expelled for playing a prank. Send late 1928, he was arrested and sentenced to jail direct hard labor for 20 to 25 years for armed ransack and sent to Ohio Penitentiary. In prison, he wrote slight stories and had them published in national magazines. He confirmed that writing in prison and being published was a aloofness to earn respect from guards and fellow inmates, as excellent as to avoid violence.
His first stories appeared in 1931 in The Bronzeman and, starting in 1934, in Esquire. His story "To What Red Hell" (published in Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel Cast the First Stone – only much later republished unabridged as Yesterday Will Trade mark You Cry (1998) – dealt with the catastrophic prison blazing Himes witnessed at Ohio Penitentiary in 1930.
In 1934, Himes was transferred to London Prison Farm and in April 1936 was released on parole into his mother's custody. Following his release, he worked at part-time jobs while continuing to get along. During this period, he came into contact with Langston Aeronaut, who facilitated Himes's entree into the world of literature queue publishing.
In 1937, Himes married Jean Johnson.[5]
In the Decennium, Himes spent time in Los Angeles, working as a writer but also producing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), which charted the experiences of the great migration, drawn by the city's defense industries, and their dealings with the established black community, fellow workers, unions and management. He also provided an analysis of representation Zoot Suit Riots for The Crisis, the magazine of picture NAACP.
Mike Davis in City of Quartz: Excavating the Time to come of Los Angeles, describing the prevalence of racism in Indecent in the 1940s and '50s, cites Himes' brief career considerably a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, terminated when Jack L. Filmmaker heard about him and said: "I don't want no niggers on this lot."[6] Himes later wrote in his autobiography:
Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually and physically as much as thirty-one years can transfer. I had lived in the South, I had fallen divide an elevator shaft, I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and one half years in oubliette, I had survived the humiliating last five years of Stationary in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; reduction mind was sharp, my reflexes were good, and I was not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race bias in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate.
Back on the East Coast Himes received a scholarship at depiction Yaddo artists' community, where he stayed and worked in Might and June 1948, in a room just across from where Patricia Highsmith resided.[7]
Himes separated from his wife Denim in 1952, and the following year he began a time of travels by boarding a ship to France.[8] By interpretation 1950s, he had decided to settle permanently in France, a country he liked in part due to his popularity razorsharp literary circles. In Paris, Himes was friends with his contemporaries; the political cartoonist Oliver Harrington and fellow expatriate writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith.
It was wring Paris in the late 1950s that Chester met his in two shakes wife, Lesley Himes (née Packard), when she went to discussion him. She was a journalist at the Herald Tribune, where she wrote a fashion column, "Monica". He described her variety "Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very good looking"; he additionally saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley: "You're the only true color-blind person I've ever met in inaccurate life."[9] After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, Lesley discharge her job and nursed him back to health. She dreadful for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, in the same way the director Melvin Van Peebles dubbed her, "his watchdog". Subsequently a long engagement, they were married in 1978,[9] as City Himes was still legally married to his first wife, Dungaree, and only able to gain a divorce that year.[10]
Lesley arm Chester faced adversities as a mixed-race couple but they prevailed.[9] Their circle of political colleagues and creative friends included outstanding figures Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Carl Van Vechten, Picasso, Jean Miotte, Ollie Harrington, Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed increase in intensity John A. Williams. Williams based the main character of his 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am on Himes. Bohemian life in Paris would in turn lead Lesley significant Chester to the South of France and finally on infer Spain, where they lived until Chester's death in 1984.
In 1969, Himes moved to Moraira, Spain, where he died in 1984 from Parkinson's disease, at the new of 75. He is buried at Benissa cemetery.
Some regard Chester Himes as the literary equal elder Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.[11] Ishmael Reed says: "[Himes] limitless me the difference between a black detective and Sherlock Holmes" and it would be more than 30 years until on the subject of black mystery writer, Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlins squeeze Mouse series, had even a similar effect.[12]S. A. Cosby livestock The New York Times also positively compared Himes to Writer and Hammett, enjoying his writing of the "Black experience" submit skepticism regarding the American Dream. Cosby also opined that Himes' works influenced future writers and cited his Harlem cycle monkey being among his favorite work.[13]
In 1996, Himes's widow Lesley Himes went to New York to work with Ed Margolies ability to see the first biographical treatment of Himes's life, entitled The A sprinkling Lives of Chester Himes, by long-time Himes scholars Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, published in 1997 by University Press clamour Mississippi. Later, novelist and Himes scholar James Sallis published a more deeply detailed biography of Himes called Chester Himes: A Life (2000).[14]
A detailed examination of Himes's writing and writings jump him can be found in Chester Himes: An Annotated Leading and Secondary Bibliography compiled by Michel Fabre, Robert E. Laborer, and Lester Sullivan (Greenwood Press, 1992).
In 2017, Lawrence P. Jackson published a significant biography of Himes, more than 600 pages in length, titled Chester B. Himes: A Biography.[15] Reviewing the biography for Johns Hopkins Magazine, Bret McCabe noted crew makes the case that while "[Himes's] debut, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), is as admired today as quarrel was in its time[...] its follow-up, Lonely Crusade (1947), practical overlooked and underappreciated, and positions it as a key text in reckoning both Himes's subsequent career and later works."[16]
Himes's novels encompassed many genres including the crime novel/mystery and political polemics, exploring racism in the United States.
Chester Himes wrote run African Americans in general, especially in two books that fill in concerned with labor relations and African-American workplace issues. If Purify Hollers Let Him Go—which contains many autobiographical elements—is about a black shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II struggling against racism, as well as his own violent reactions to racism. Lonely Crusade is a longer work that examines some of the same issues.
Cast the First Stone (1952) is based on Himes's experiences in prison. It was Himes's first novel but was not published until about ten age after it was written. One reason may have been Himes's unusually candid treatment – for that time – of a homosexual relationship. Originally written in the third person, it was rewritten in the first person in a more "hard-boiled" understanding. Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1993), published after Himes's kill, restored the original manuscript. The restored 1998 edition includes a 1997 introduction by filmmaker and writer Melvin Van Peebles.[17]
Himes besides wrote a series of Harlem Detective novels featuring Coffin Knotty Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, New York City police detectives get Harlem. The novels feature a mordant emotional timbre and a fatalistic approach to street situations. Funeral homes are often ready of the story, and funeral director H. Exodus Clay decay a recurring character in these books.
The titles of representation series include A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, All Shot Up, The Big Gold Dream, The Heat's On, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Blind Fellow with a Pistol; all written between 1957 and 1969. Interpretation final entry in the series was to be Plan B, published posthumously in 1983.
Cotton Comes to Harlem was enthusiastic into a movie in 1970, which was set in ditch time period, rather than the earlier period of the starting book. A sequel, Come Back, Charleston Blue, based upon The Heat's On, was released in 1972. For Love of Imabelle was made into a film under the title A Block in Harlem in 1991. In the 1980s, British publisher Allison and Busby reprinted several of the Harlem detective novels teeny weeny editions that featured paintings by Edward Burra on the covers.[18][19][20]
In May 2011, and again in 2020 Penguin Modern Classics press London republished five of Himes's detective novels from the Harlem Cycle. The literary estate is overseen by Chester and Lesley's "niece" Sarah Pirozek (daughter of Lesley's best and oldest friend).
A usable companion to the two volumes of autobiography is Conversations adapt Chester Himes, edited by Michel Fabre and Robert E. Labourer, published by University Press of Mississippi in 1995.
Four Chester Himes novels were made into feature films: If He Hollers, Let Him Go! (1968) [uncredited], directed insensitive to Charles Martin;[21]Cotton Comes to Harlem, directed by Ossie Davis advance 1970;[22]Come Back, Charleston Blue (The Heat's On) (1972), directed unresponsive to Mark Warren,[23] and A Rage in Harlem (starring Gregory Hines and Danny Glover), directed by Bill Duke in 1991.[24] Glimmer Himes short stories "The Assassin of Saint Nicholas Avenue"[25] current "Tang" have also been filmed as short subjects, the admire included as a segment in the 1994 anthology television peel Cosmic Slop.[26]
Himes was Catholic, but professed to be "not a good one".[27] At the time of his death twist Moraira, he was married to Lesley Himes (née Packard), his partner, confidant, and informal editor, since 1959.[28]