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...

LAST MAY, WHEN the Food and Drug Administration decided not to allow pharmacies to sell the emergency contraceptive Plan B over the counter, we wrote that the FDA was within its rights to be cautious. The agency had overridden the advice of a panel...

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The state House on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill to require all hospitals to offer rape victims emergency contraception, over objections from Catholic leaders who say it infringes on their religious rights.The legislation, which passed the Democratic-controlled Senate last week, now moves to Republican Gov....

Roman Catholic bishops in Connecticut have agreed to let hospital personnel give emergency contraception to all rape victims, reversing their decision days before a new state law requires it.The church, which runs four of the state's 30 hospitals, had fought the state law requiring medical...