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 piv...

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." Himes...

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, he...