If He Hollers Let Him Go [Import] [Paperback]

Chester Himes (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press / Liberation Classics, 1986; New Ed edition (1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745301460
• ISBN-13: 978-0745301464
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,950,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finely sustained rage at WWII era racism., March 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: If He Hollers Let Him Go (Paperback)

Himes writes in the style of Charles Bukowsky, but in 1946, telling the story of a black man living in South Central LA and working in the WWII shipyard industry, confronting racist bosses and a white southern borderline-personality seductress/accuser. I had to put this book down a couple times because I was emotionally drained: the rage is sustained and precariously balanced. Walter Mosley must have read this one for background for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, but Himes is far from easy. Himes does not deserve his obscurity

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great American and African American Novel, May 12, 2006

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If He Hollers Let Him Go: A Novel (Himes, Chester) (Paperback)

This is a great novel of this country and its life, and of African American literature. What it does is take its hero and make him the center of so much evil and so much force, that a fault line is exposed through the rotten heart of American society, particularly as it was during the Second World War when the story is written.

Jones starts out as a fairly "OK" figure, a Black worker who has succeeded in a war time shipyard playing the game square with possessions and an upwardly mobile future and deferment from the War as an essential war worker. Then every force gets set after him, a trashy white woman coworker who flirts and cries rape, the union bureaucrats who are supposed to be defending his rights as a worker but will do anything to keep peace for the war (a depiction in this and other novels that got Himes's the blackball by Communist party supporters in the literary world), of course, the police, the Black middle class represented by his girl friend, and his own fear and self doubt. He seems to be colliding with the whole world unified around "the war effort" and peace at home.

As such, the novel can grip the reader, not just due to its social or historical impact, but because it does the real ideal work of a novel, one character, seeming an average person, set against big forces, struggling for life. It does that well. I will not say any more lest I spoil the experience of this novel for those who need to read it.

Himes has good grit and good realism. Much is said about his association with crime fiction, although when this book was written he had no idea that years latter, he would be so disgusted with the lack of respect he got as an artist and with political black balling he got for writing honestly about the corruption and political sellout of the Black struggle by the Communist party, that Himes would flee the country, end up in Europe and then live by writing mysteries.

I have always thought that this novel and in some of his other literary work as well as the detective novels, Himes showed a superior sense of fundamental accuracy of details and an ability to convey a real world with real details without flooding the reader with description. I am not a big fan of any kind of dectective novels, by Himes work always brings me back to what it was like to be in New York, especially Harlem, in the 1950s. They are remarkable in that they were written by a writer who had not visited the US, let alone Harlem in years.

This is a great novel, a great read, a page turner, and a mind satisfyer. It is sad that it is not more known and appreciated.

You appreciate by getting it and reading it!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Indignities and rage of a black shipyard worker during WWII, March 29, 2002

By 

Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If He Hollers Let Him Go (Paperback)

Chester Himes's first novel is a vivid portrait of black rage in Los Angeles during World War II, when blacks were able to get shipyard jobs, but had to work with (or for) southern whites who expected deference from those they considered their inferiors (indeed, regarded as subhuman). Himes crammed a lot into 203 pages. I find Bob Jones's dreams and his dialogue with Alice not just didactic, but forced, and the sexual politics is at some points difficult to believe. In contrast, the fury and terror of indignities at work, with the LAPD, with duplicitous white coworkers, union and company officials burn true. In the four days after snapping back at a Texan woman who spits out the n-word, Bob loses his position (and therefore his draft deferment), his middle-class girlfriend, his car, the money in his wallet, his shoes, and his freedom.