Chester Himes

Dictionary of Missouri Biography, edited by Lawrence O. Christensen, William E. Foley, Gary R. Kremer, and Kenneth H. Winn (University of Missouri Press, 1999)

Chester Bomar Himes (1909-1984) began writing while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery and went on to become one of the most popular American authors in France on the basis of his series of crime novels set in Harlem. His dark and cynical view of the effects of racism on the American psyche, both black and white, did not fit well with the movement for integration in the post-World War II period, and he achieved only sporadic success in the United States, though his work was extremely influential on a later generation of African American artists who began working in the 1960s and 1970s.

Himes was born on July 29, 1909, in Jefferson City, Missouri, where his father taught blacksmithing and wheelwrighting as the head of Lincoln Institute’s mechanical department. In 1914 the family moved to Alcorn, Mississippi, where the elder Himes taught at Alcorn A&M, and a few years later to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he taught at Branch Normal Institute. After Chester’s brother Joseph was blinded in an accident in 1922, the family moved to St. Louis so that Joseph could be treated at Barnes Hospital. While in St. Louis, Chester attended Wendell Phillips High School.

In 1925 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Himes graduated from high school the next year. He entered Ohio State University in the fall of 1926, but left the following year because of failing grades and disciplinary problems. He returned to Cleveland where he was arrested in 1928, having robbed the house of a rich white couple at gunpoint and stolen their car. Sentenced to twenty-five years, he ended up serving seven and a half years in the Ohio State Penitentiary before being paroled in 1936.

Himes began publishing short stories in Abbot’s Monthly and the Atlanta Daily World in 1933. In 1934 his two short stories of prison life, “Crazy in Stir” and “To What Red Hell,” were printed in Esquire, which published several of his stories over the next twelve years. After being paroled in May 1936, Himes returned to Cleveland where he worked for the Works Progress Administration as a library research assistant and then as a member of the Ohio Writers’ Project. Moving to California in 1940 he worked at numerous war-industry jobs, primarily as an unskilled laborer, while also publishing stories in Crisis, Opportunity, and Negro Story. He was appalled by the level of racism he encountered in wartime Los Angeles, writing later in his autobiography, “Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known—much more than any city I remember from the South.”

Himes moved to New York in 1944, but Los Angeles provided the setting for his first two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947). If He Hollers was a moderate success, but the failure of Lonely Crusade left Himes embittered for years and determined to leave the country as soon as possible. Both works focus on racial and class tensions among workers in the booming war industries. Seeking to explore racism in all its subtleties and nuances, Himes argued that not only did racism have a debilitating effect on whites, but it also had severe consequences for black consciousness. In a 1947 speech at the University of Chicago, he stated: “If this plumbing for the truth reveals within the Negro personality homicidal mania, lust for white women, a pathetic sense of inferiority, paradoxical anti-Semitism, arrogance, uncle tomism, hate and fear and self-hate, this then is the effect of oppression on the human personality. These are the daily horrors, the daily realities, the daily experiences of an oppressed minority.”

In 1953, with the money from the advance for his autobiographical novel The Third Generation, Himes left the United States for Europe where, except for a few brief periods, he spent the rest of his life. Living in Majorca, Spain, in 1954, he wrote The Primitive, a sensational novel of the love-hate relationship between a black man and a white woman, which Himes considered his finest work. However, he constantly had trouble with his publishers, both American and European, and for most of his life he made little profit from his writing. Strapped for money while living in Paris in 1956, he began writing crime fiction for Gallimard’s “La serie noire.” His crime novel, For Love of Imabelle (1957), won the prestigious French Grand Prix for the year’s best detective story.

Between 1957 and 1969 Himes published nine crime novels set in Harlem, most of them based on the exploits of his two fictional detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. These novels are marked by grotesque characters, graphic violence, an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos, and a grim sense of humor. As Himes wrote in his autobiography:

      Some time before, I didn’t know when, my mind had rejected all reality as I had 

      known it and I began to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence 

      was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and 

      it falls off. Damn reality, I thought. All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent 

      and hurting. It was funny, really, if I could just get the joke. And I got the handle, by                       some miracle.

Toward the end of his life Himes began to be recognized by a younger generation of black writers and artists—notably John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, and Melvin van Peebles—as a major influence on the generation that came of age after World War II. Himes also, for the first time in his life, attained a degree of financial security. After the publication of Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), the last in his crime series, he moved to Cabo de Moraira, Spain, and wrote the two volumes of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976). He died in Moraira on November 12, 1984.

Fuller, Hoyt W. “Traveler on the Long, Rough Lonely Old Road: An Interview with Chester Himes.” Black World 21 (March 1972): 4-22, 87-98.

Lundquist, James. Chester Himes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976.

Milliken, Stephen F. Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Muller, Gilbert H. Chester Himes. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Williams, John A. “Chester Himes: My Man Himes.” In Flashbacks: A Twenty-Year Diary of Article Writing, 292-352. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974.