Chester Himes

Chester Himes grew up in a middle-class Black family that moved frequently across the American South and Midwest, and his early life was marked by hardship, including a serious injury to his brother that left him permanently blind due to being denied prompt medical treatment at a segregated hospital. Himes was expelled from Ohio State University and, after a series of run-ins with the law, was sentenced to 20 years in an Ohio penitentiary for armed robbery at age 19.

It was in prison that Himes began writing seriously, publishing short stories in national magazines including Esquire while still incarcerated, and he was paroled after eight years. He published his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in 1945, a searing portrait of racism in the wartime defence industry, followed by several more novels examining race and violence in American life, though his work often struggled to find a wide readership in the United States.

In 1953, Himes relocated permanently to France, where a French publisher commissioned him to write detective fiction. The result was his celebrated Harlem Detective series, featuring Harlem police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, blending violent, fast-paced crime plots with sharp social commentary on race and poverty in Harlem. The series, beginning with A Rage in Harlem in 1957, brought Himes major critical and commercial success in Europe and established him as one of the most influential crime novelists of the twentieth century, a reputation that grew considerably in the United States after his death in 1984.