Chester Himes

At 75 years old, Chester Himes physical status not available right now. We will update Chester Himes's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909-October 12, 1984) was a black American writer.

If He Hollers Let Him Go and the Harlem Detective series are two of his books.

He won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1958, 1958.

Life

Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on July 29, 1909, to Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes; his father was a professor of industrial trades at a black college; his mother, before getting married, served as a tutor at Scotia Seminary. Chester Himes grew up in a Missouri middle-class household. When he was about 12 years old, his father took up teaching at Branch Normal College (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), and a tragedy took place shortly that would forever change Hime's views of race relations. He had misbehaved and his mother made him miss a gunpowder march that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to attend during a school assembly. Joseph mixed the chemicals himself, causing an explosion in his face. The blinded boy was refused medical attention after being carried to the nearest hospital, owing to Jim Crow's rule. In The Quality of Hurt, Hees wrote, "One day in my life hurt me as much as any other put together."

The family later settled in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents' marriage was unhappy and eventually ended in divorce.

Himes' family left Pine Bluff and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended East High School. He attended Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where he became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, but was suspended for playing a prank. He was arrested and sentenced to 20 to 25 years in prison for a armed robbery in late 1928 and sent to the Ohio Penitentiary. He wrote short stories and had them published in national newspapers while in jail. He said that writing in jail and being published was a way to receive trust from guards and fellow prisoners, as well as avoiding violence.

In 1931, his first stories appeared in The Bronzeman and, beginning in 1934, in Esquire magazine. His book "To What Red Hell" (published in Esquire in 1934), as well as his book Cast the First Stone (1998), dealt with the terrible prison fire Hees experienced at Ohio Penitentiary in 1930.

In 1934, Himes was moved to London Prison Farm, and in April 1936, he was released on parole into his mother's custody. Following his release, he worked part-time jobs while writing. He came into contact with Langston Hughes, who aided Himes' ascension to literature and publishing during this period.

He married Jean Johnson in 1937.

Himes spent time in Los Angeles as a screenwriter but also authoring two books, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), charting the city's history, fellow workers, unions, and management, among the established black community, as a result of the city's unprecedented black community, as well as the city's labor unions and management, were among the city's decades of great migration. For The Crisis, the NAACP's newsletter, he gave an account of the Zoot Suit Riots.

Mike Davis of City of Quartz describing the prevalence of racial in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, cites Himes' brief stint as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, who said: "I don't want no niggers on this lot."

Himes later wrote in his autobiography:

A scholarship at the Yaddo artists' group, where he lived and worked in May and June 1948 in a room just across from where Patricia Highsmith lived.

Himes separated from his wife Jean in 1952 and embarked on a journey of travels by boarding a ship to France the following year. He had opted to settle permanently in France by the 1950s, a country he loved in part due to his fame in literary circles. Himes was the contemporary of political cartoonist Oliver Harrington and fellow expatriate writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Gardner Smith.

When she went to interview Chester in the late 1950s, she discovered her second wife, Lesley Himes (née Packard). She served as a journalist at the Herald Tribune, where she wrote "Monica" as a fashion column. She described her as "Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and good looking"; she also saw her strength and tenacity, according to Lesley: "You're the only truly color-blind person I've ever encountered in my life." Lesley resigned from work and nursed him back to health after he suffered a stroke in 1959. She cared for him for the remainder of his life and spent time with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante, and, as the filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles referred to her as "his watchdog." They married in 1978 after a long marriage but were only able to get a divorce that year.

Lesley and Chester were thrown into disgrace as a mixed-race couple, but they triumphed. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright's circle of political colleagues and creative acquaintances included not only those who were influential, such as Malcolm X, Carl Van Vechten, Picasso, Jean Miotte, Ollie Harrington, Nikki Giovanni, and Ishmael Reed; it also included figures such as Malcolm X, Margaret Hay, Robert Morris, Stuart Mantle, Robert Wright and Ishmael Reed. Bohemian life in Paris would eventually lead them to France and then Spain, where they lived until Chester's death in 1984.

Himes immigrated to Moraira, Spain, where he died from Parkinson's disease in 1984 at the age of 75. He is buried in Benissa cemetery.

Source