Chester Himes

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Chester Himes

Chester Bomar Himes (born July 29, 1909 in Jefferson City Missouri (USA), † November 13, 1984 in Moraira (Spain)) was an African-American writer .

Life

1909-1928

Himes was born to Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes. His father taught blacksmithing and metalworking at the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City. Himes first attended Alcorn College (Mississippi), then the Branch Normal School in Pine Bluff (Arkansas), where his father had accepted positions, and finally the East High School in Cleveland (Ohio), where he graduated from high school in early 1926 with moderate grades made. He then worked as an errand boy in a hotel in Cleveland . In an accident at work there - he fell into an elevator shaft - he was seriously injured. As the hotel was to blame for the accident, Himes, who suffered from the consequences of the accident for a long time, was entitled to a small disability pension. After a lengthy stay in hospital, he enrolled at Ohio State University in Columbus in September 1926 , where, however, more than with his studies, he passed the time with gambling, drinking and visiting brothels. After he was expelled from the university, his criminal career began. After several parole sentences, 19-year-old Himes was finally sentenced to 20 to 25 years' hard labor imprisonment for armed robbery in late 1928 and was sent to Ohio State Prison.

1929-1953

Chester Himes (1946)

It was only in prison, so Himes wrote later, that he became a man. Here he also began to write and he managed to publish his first short stories. In 1930 he witnessed a fire in prison that killed at least 320 inmates (portrayed in his story To What Red Hell and the prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry ). His first story appeared in 1931 in the Afro-American magazine The Bronzeman ; from 1934 onwards he managed to sell a number of stories to the respected Esquire magazine . In the same year, Himes was transferred to London Prison Farm and in April 1936 was paroled into his mother's care. As a result, he got by with odd jobs, writing and publishing. During this time he made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes , one of the most important authors of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, who helped him to make literary contacts. Also in 1936, Himes married Jean Johnson. In 1941, the couple moved to Los Angeles because California was less racial and job opportunities were better. During this time contacts arose with civil rights organizations and the Communist Party . In 1945 Hime's first novel If He Hollers Let Him Go was published , which had some critical success and did not sell badly. His second novel Lonely Crusade (1947), however, fell through, which was also due to the fact that Himes presented his former white, leftist companions as duplicitous on racial issues. As a result, he was no longer able to make a living as a writer. At the end of the 1950s, Chester and Jean Himes separated (they did not divorce until 1978) and he left the US for France in early 1953.

1953-1984

The most famous and successful Afro-American author Richard Wright was already in Paris , with whom Himes quickly became friends; soon to be joined by the young James Baldwin . Through Wright, Himes got in touch with French publishers. After initially not having any literary success in France either, at the suggestion of the publisher Marcel Duhamel he began to write his series of detective novels, known as the Harlem cycle, about the policemen Grave Digger and Coffin Ed. A first volume The Real Cool Killers appeared in French translation in 1959 ( Il pleut des coups durs ). For A Rage in Harlem (1957, French: La Reine de pommes ), he was the first American author to receive the prestigious French crime crime prize Grand prix de littérature policière . The other volumes were also successful and were translated into German, among other things.

In 1960 he met the Englishwoman Lesley Packard, who became his partner and later, in 1978, his second wife. In the late 1960s and in the wake of political developments and the race riots in the United States, radicalized Himes sound, which is the Harlem cycle in the last two novels Blind Man With a Pistol and the posthumously published Plan B reflected. At that time, Himes had given up all hope that it could succeed in peacefully resolving the oppression of black Americans by the whites.

By the early 1970s, Himes was seriously ill and suffered multiple heart attacks. Apart from his two-volume autobiography, he wrote almost nothing during this period. As early as 1969, Himes had moved with Lesley to Spain near Alicante , where he died in 1984.

Posthumously

The American society Friends of Chester Himes (FOCH) presented the Chester Himes Award, named after Himes, between 1996 and 2003 . The award was intended to highlight the influence and importance of African-American writers in black crime fiction .

Works

Novels and short stories
  • 1945 If He Hollers Let Him Go
  • 1947 The Lonely Crusade
  • 1952 Cast the First Stone (appeared severely mutilated and edited)
  • 1954 The Third Generation
    • Mrs. Taylor and her sons , German from Maria Wolff, Berlin, Frankfurt / M., Vienna: Ullstein,
  • 1955 The End of a Primitive
  • 1957 For Love of Imabelle also: A Rage in Harlem
    • Die Geldmacher von Harlem , German by Elly and Wilm Wolfgang Elwenspoek, Berlin: Ullstein, 1962;
    • New translation by Manfred Görgens, Zurich, Union, 1999, ISBN 3-293-20144-X
  • 1959 The Real Cool Killers
    • Hot night for cool killers , German by WW Elwenspoek, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969; ISBN 3-499-42165-8
    • New translation by Alex Bischoff, Zurich: Union, 1999, ISBN 3-293-20149-0
  • 1959 The Crazy Kill
    • Lintel in Harlem , German by Elly and Wilm Wolfgang Elwenspoek, Berlin: Ullstein, 1961;
    • New translation by Manfred Görgens, Zurich: Union, 1998; ISBN 3-293-20131-8
  • 1960 The Big Gold Dream
    • The dream of big money , German by Wilm Wolfgang Elwenspoek, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969
    • New translation by Manfred Görgens, Zurich: Union, 1998, ISBN 3-293-20110-5
  • 1960 All Shot up
    • Rauhnacht in Harlem , German by Wilm Wolfgang Elwenspoek, Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1967
    • also: Harlem is going crazy , Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976, ISBN 3-499-42388-X
  • 1960 Run Man Run
    • Run nigger run , German by Norbert Wölfl, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968, ISBN 3-499-42141-0
    • Run man run , German by Manfred Görgens, Zurich: Union, 1998, ISBN 3-293-20118-0
  • 1961 Pinktoes
    • Black velvet on hot nights . German by Katja Behrens, Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe,
  • 1965 Cotton Comes to Harlem
    • Black money for white crooks , German by Wilm Wolfgang Elwenspoek, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967
  • 1966 The Heat's on
    • Heroin for Harlem , German by Wilm W. Elwenspoek, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968
  • 1969 Blind Man with a Pistol
    • Blind, with a pistol , German by Hella von Spies, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970, ISBN 3-498-02816-2
  • 1972 The Quality of Hurt
  • 1973 Black on Black
  • 1976 My Life of Absurdity
  • 1980 A Case of Rape
  • 1990 The Collected Stories of Chester Himes
  • 1993 Plan B
  • 1998 Yesterday Will Make You Cry (Edition of Cast the First Stone as intended by Himes)
Autobiographical
  • 1973 The Quality of Hurt
  • 1976 My Life of Absurdity

Film adaptations

  • 1970: When Night falls in Manhattan (Cotton Comes to Harlem) , directed and written by Ossie Davis
  • 1972: When it gets dark in Harlem (Come Back, Charleston Blue) , directed by Mark Warren (adaptation of The Heat's On )
  • 1991: Harlem Action - A Rage in Harlem , directed by Bill Duke
  • 1994: Tang (part of the television sci-fi trilogy Cosmic Slop , directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan; adaptation of the story Tang )

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Himes, Chester
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Himes, Chester Bomar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Jefferson City , Missouri , USA
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1984
Place of death Moraira , Spain