Chester Himes: A Life (Paperback)

~ (Author) "It is exceedingly strange to know so well a man one has never met..." (more)
Key Phrases: reine des pommes, lonely crusade, prison novel, New York, Chester Himes, Van Vechten (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Penzler Pick, May 2001: In James Sallis's long-awaited biography of novelist Chester Himes, he reveals that his own crime fiction career was partly inspired by the older writer's example. Admiring Himes's work ever since he first encountered it, Sallis began to haunt used bookstores in order to turn up more of it and eventually dedicated one of his Lew Griffin titles to Himes, while making the author of Cotton Comes to Harlem and Pinktoes a character in another.

Researching and producing a life of a fellow author is homage of a vastly greater order. It is a full-time, obsessive commitment that seldom turns out as expected. First viewing Himes as a sui generis author of savagely slapstick ghetto crime comedies, Sallis came to regard his subject instead as "America's central black writer." "It is exceedingly strange to know so well a man one has never met," Sallis begins. Yet a fully rounded portrait of Chester Bomar Himes, the Missouri-born, middle-class rebel and prison veteran, much of whose life was spent as an angry black man in European self-exile, was not an easy one to paint, even for someone as sympathetic as this biographer.

Born in 1908, Himes was a 19-year-old college dropout when he began serving what would be seven years of a 20- to 25-year jail sentence for burglary. "I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary," he would later write. While behind bars, he managed to sell two hard-boiled stories to Esquire. Bought by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich, these "authentic" tales of a real-life convict appeared in a magazine that featured such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1936, at the age of 26, Himes was paroled and from then on embarked on a writer's path, though there were many obstacles, real and perceived, awaiting him. Whether moving from a stint in the WPA Writers Project to a utopian community in Ohio, or from the fringes of the Hollywood labor force to the lesser ranks of the Communist party, Chester Himes came more and more to regard himself as "a man without a country."

Even at Yaddo, the famed New York state writers' colony where he had a fellowship in 1948 (and lived across the hall from Patricia Highsmith as she worked on her first novel, Strangers on a Train), he was dissatisfied. Soon joining such fellow African American expatriates as Richard Wright and James Baldwin in France, he began to establish a reputation in Europe that would eventually precede him home.

"It is exceedingly strange to know so little, finally, about a man with whom you have spent so much time," Sallis winds up admitting ruefully at the end of his introduction. Readers of Chester Himes: A Life will know much more than they did when they began this highly intelligent if idiosyncratically assembled volume. --Otto Penzler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist and critic Sallis (Bluebottle; etc.) delivers a satisfying, thoughtful, long-overdue biography of Chester Himes (1909-1984), a singular American writer and fascinating figure. Sallis outlines the author's threefold marginalization--as a WWII-era literary realist, as a crime novelist and as an African-American writer, a colleague of Wright and Baldwin. With unflagging clarity, he embarks on simultaneous explorations of Himes's writing and his tumultuous personal life. Sallis details Himes's upbringing in a fragmented, middle-class family, his brief infatuation with crime and the inception of his writing career in an Ohio state prison, during which time his work appeared in Esquire. In the 1940s and '50s Himes found himself in a cycle of literary aspirations and disappointments, epitomized by Jack Warner's memorable dismissal: "I don't want no niggers on this lot." Sallis weaves such accounts in with his solid discussions of Himes's important early novels, tightly atmospheric works that failed to find an audience in the racially charged climate. During Himes's expatriation in Europe, financial difficulties drove him toward surreal detective fiction, which won him acclaim late in life, as his health declined. Sallis's astute, writerly riffs on American inequities and literary vagaries zero in on what haunted Himes even in exile. As an "outsider" writer who forged unsettling social panoramas through violent fiction, perhaps Himes's only equal is Jim Thompson, and, similarly, Sallis's pithy book has the import of Robert Polito's biography of that better-known master of American crime. B&w photos. (Feb. 22)Forecast: Booksellers may note the appeal of this title to readers of mystery, literary history and African-American studies, and score a trifecta.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802776396
• ISBN-13: 978-0802776396
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,121,199 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Derivative biography of a sphynx, November 10, 2002

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

Expatriate African American writer Chester Himes's complicated life is the subject of a biography published in 2000 by detective novelist James Sallis, a longtime Himes champion. Sallis's biography weighs in at 368 pages. It is readable despite numerous repetitions and some awkwardness about introducing other figures in Himes's life, but Sallis's book does not seem to be based on any new research and relies almost entirely on reviews contemporary to the original publications of Himes's book augmented by what academic critics have written. It is very odd that Sallis provides so little of his own reading of Himes's writing.

The biographical research on which Sallis draws very, very heavily and without citation is the discerning and more succinct (209-page) 1997 biography by Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, _The Several Lives of Chester Himes_. Margolies and Fabre knew Himes in his later years and did serious biographical research on Himes (and other black American expatriates to France, especially Richard Wright, who helped Himes in many ways when he moved to Paris). Sallis adds no discernible research and does not make more sense of Himes than they did, so I would recommend the Margolies and Fabre biography in preference to the Sallis one (and on Himes's writing, Stephen Milliken's 1976 book _Chester Himes_). One may read both biographies and both volumes of Himes' "memoirs" and still wonder "Who was this guy?" and "What made him tick?" (Himes's own answer was "hurt," but the way he deployed the category made it all but meaningless.)

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars take or leave it,hit or miss., September 17, 2009

By	Zara (Greenville nc) - See all my reviews

ANOTHER BLACK MALE WRITER WITH NOTHING GOOD TO SAY ABOUT BLACK WOMEN,AND ALWAYS DROOLING OVER WHITE WOMEN ,WHO HE TREATED NO BETTER.A SELFISH JERK WHO NEVER TOOK ANY RESPONBILITY,WHINE AND WHINE.THE BOOK WASN'T A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME.