Like many African American writers, Chester Himes (1909-84) found personal and artistic freedom in Europe; his biographers, appropriately, are a French-American duo. They chronicle with perception a stormy life: a respectable, middle-class Southern childhood; rebellion culminating in armed robbery and an eight-year jail term; a writing career during which he won greater acclaim for the mysteries he cranked out for money (most notably Cotton Comes to Harlem) than for more "serious" novels. Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, who knew Himes, sensitively delineate his complex psyche.
Margolies (emeritus, Coll. of Staten Island) and Fabre (emeritus, Universite de la Sorbonne) are probably best known for their work on Richard Wright. It took them almost 15 years to complete this slim biography of Wright's fellow expatriate writer, Himes (author of such popular novels as A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem). It is easy to see why this project took so long. The authors have done an exhaustive search of archival sources and conducted numerous interviews with Himes's friends and family, resulting in a disturbing portrait of a creative, highly complex man. The authors chronicle his troubled relationship with his parents, his brushes with the law, his life in Europe, his struggles to be considered a "serious" writer, his conflicting views on race relations, and a numbing litany of his affairs (mostly interracial). This is a fascinating, highly readable book best taken in small pieces. Recommended for academic collections.?Louis J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn Campus
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
A critical biography that reveals the varied profiles of the expatriate author
From the Inside Flap
A critical biography that reveals the varied profiles of the expatriate author
From the Back Cover
The Writings of Chester Himes are colored by a fascinating blend of hatred and tenderness, of hard-boiled realism and generous idealism. His life was complex, his relationships complicated. How did this gifted son of a respectable southern black family become a juvenile delinquent? How did he acquire self-esteem and a new sense of identity by writing short stories while in the Ohio state penitentiary? Drawn from his letters, notebooks, memoirs, and fiction, this straightforward account of Himes's varied, episodic life attempts to trace the origins of his significant literary gift. It details the socioeconomic, familial, and cultural background that fed his ambivalent views on race in America. His Deep South childhood, his adolescence in the Midwest, his young manhood in prison, his years as a menial laborer, his struggle as an author in California and New York City, and finally his glory days as an expatriate and celebrity in France and Spain are plumbed deeply for their effects upon his creative urges and his works. In his native country Himes is recalled more as the author of successful detective novels such as Cotton Comes to Harlem than as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In France and Spain, his adopted countries, he is regarded as a literary master. This critical biography is the bittersweet story of a troubled man who found salvation in writing.
![Yesterday Will Make You Cry [a Novel]](https://iza-server.uibk.ac.at/pywb/dilimag/20210113092156im_/https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71mUPGrdABL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
