Archive for the ‘black writer’ tag
Remembering Chester Himes
I have in my collection of pulp fiction rare 1969 printing of a Chester Himes’s Run Man Run. The jacket is at the same time to copy the letter and the top: “Sex and the luxuriant black crude violence and served raw with a big black writer.” If you belong to a micro-summary of the work of Chester Himes, which is sufficient.
Himes, 100 are now, enough sand and embodies the greatness of life lasts. As a teenager in Cleveland, who lost their virginity in what he described as “an old fat ugly whore.” As a young man was expelled from Ohio State University, with slots for armed robbery and sentenced to 25 years of hard work. Once inside, however, bidet Hímes of their time writing short stories, and published in Esquire magazine, using the number of the prison that his nickname – 59623.
In 1945, the novel Hímes If it hollers let go of its first publication, and the first in the sense that some copies of contemporary novels protest. It was. Sweet Hímes never sell his contempt for the systemic racism of the day or the integration of blacks said “beggars whining.”
Fed to political career, as his colleague and friend the writer James Baldwin, is perhaps Hímes America to Paris … in 1955 and left the protest novel to start a new series of books: The cycle of Harlem. By For the love of Imabelle in 1957 and ending in a blind with a firearm in 1969, eight new Harlem cycle would not only be more sustainable Hímes work, but some of the most powerful American novels ever written. With NYPD detectives “Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones as the actors, readers took a tour of Harlem, New York, which does not sponsor and do not be discouraged.” I put the slang, the routine daily, the complexity of human relationships and, in my novel Harlem, “said Hímes once.
Understand what was formerly an “exotic” and the population and has become a reality. Therefore Hímes prefers to call his book “national novel” instead of detective fiction.
Some said that Hímes Jackie Robinson simplistic black fiction. All is not true. Even if you Hímes in France to receive the prestigious award for fiction, his success has opened doors. Hard Boiled fiction remains largely the domain of a certain type of writer.
One hundred years after his birth, for better or for worse, the great Chester Himes is almost unique.
