Chester Himes Book Collection [EPUB & MOBI]

Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on July 29, 1909, to Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes; his father was a peripatetic black college professor of industrial trades and his mother was a teacher at Scotia Seminary prior to marriage; Chester Himes grew up in a middle-class home in Missouri.

In the 1940s Himes spent time in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter but also producing two novels If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and The Lonely Crusade (1947), which charted the experiences of the wave of black in-migrants, drawn by the city’s defence industries, and their dealings with the established black community, fellow workers, unions and management. He also provided an analysis of the Zoot Suit Riots for The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP.

Mike Davis in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, describing the prevalence of racism in Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s, cites Himes’ brief career as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, terminated when Jack L. Warner heard about him and said: “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.” Himes later wrote in his autobiography.