End of a Primitive the [Paperback]

Chester Himes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 1990

Jesse Robinson wakes from his nightmare to dirty, fitful real life in a Harlem slum. Kriss wakes up alone divorced, disillusioned, in her plush Manhattan apartment. They have nothing in common. Just one amazing, passionate weekend in Chicago and a desire to meet again.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Chester Himes aficionados who've followed detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones from one grisly Harlem crime scene to the next will find a meaner, harsher reality in The End of a Primitive. In this early work, Himes paints an angry, doomed sexual relationship between a tough-guy black writer down on his luck and a wayward white party girl on a slippery slide toward addiction and abuse. Tough stuff, especially for 1955, when the novel first appeared in a bowdlerized version, and it still carries a tragic punch today, down to its classic pulp diction. Himes, a black writer who did crimes and hard time in his youth, and whose personal quest for a measure of peace finally led him to leave the United States altogether, gives the sure sense of knowing the rough turf and hopeless lives he describes. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In 1953, Himes, an important, provocative, yet largely forgotten African American novelist, left America for France in a deep depression over a lifetime of hardship to write this racially conscious roman noir. Himes (If He Hollers, Let Him Go) relates the story of two lonely, angry people in racially troubled McCarthy-era America whose lives intersect briefly in New York, an encounter that results in sex, violence and death. One character is an infertile, divorced white woman named Kriss Cummings (pun intended) who considers black men sexual trophies, of which she has many (" 'Kriss is solving the Negro Problem in bed.' "). The other, Jesse Robinson, is a black writer rooming in Harlem who is on the outs with his publisher (his latest work is " 'too sordid.... Why don't you write a black success novel?' ") The two, who met previously in Chicago, reconnect to smoke, swear, drink endless amounts of bourbon, and cut each other down. Their oddly sheltered world is one of sexual frustration, racial injustice and total despair. Himes's plot line is deceptively simple; the complex racial and sexual issues raised by this deliberately unshapely narrative are ugly and unresolved. Part of the Old School Books series of reprinted pulp fiction by black authors, the book has a hardboiled style with a racial twist that is both unsettling and addictive: "Black son of a bitch has got to have some means of joining the human race. Old Shakespeare knew. Suppose he'd had Othello kiss the bitch and make up. Would have dehumanized the bastard."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Allison & Busby (August 23, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0749000953
• ISBN-13: 978-0749000950
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,427,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interracial "Lost Weekend", February 16, 2000

By 

J. M. Dobies (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The End of a Primitive: A Novel (Old School Books) (Paperback)

Himes' French publishers called this book "sadism and buffoonery", but it's much more than that, a meditation on the manners, mores, and racism of '50's America. The Old School editors have once again done a bang-up job, restoring the text to Himes' original, not the whitewashed version published as "The Primitive" in 1955. Check it out!