Chester Bomar Himes's career extended from the mid 1930s to the mid 1980s, a time of enormous social change and racial turmoil in the United States. His work is remarkable for the honesty, intensity, and artistic skill with which it represents such a...

Novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and journalist, Chester Himes made his mark as a satirist and as a writer of detective novels. In 1970 John A. Williams maintained that "Himes is perhaps the single greatest naturalistic writer living today."...

In 1957 Chester Himes was so down and out in Paris that he was ready to write almost anything to make a buck--even a detective novel. Himes was at that point a "serious" novelist who had never written what the French called a roman policier. Instead,...

College dropout, pimp, bootlegger, and convicted armed-robber, Chester Himes began writing his acclaimed "Harlem Cycle" of crime novels in Paris in 1957. His most famous creations, the black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger...

Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 – November 12, 1984) was a famous African American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; two of his...

Chester Himes: A Life When he woke up each morning, his mother would pinch the bridge of his nose in hopes that he might have better chances in life. CHESTER HIMES, WHO died in Spain in 1984, was one of the most...

CHESTER HIMES A Life By James Sallis Walker. 358 pp. $28 What is more common than for a writer to be acclaimed in his youth, then watch as his subsequent novels or poems are dismissed as failing to match the...

In the following essay, Muller traces the development of Himes's detective fiction.

In the following essay, Newton deconstructs and compares the idea of facial “recognition” in Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go and Saul Bellow's The Victim.

In the following essay, Walters traces Himes's representation of "the absurdity of U.S. race relations" in his fiction.