Chester Himes (58 page)

4
. Milliken, p. 288.

5
.
Black on Black
, p. 11.

6
. Chester Himes to Larry Jordan, Feb. 1976, Amistad.

7
. Fabre and Margolies, p. 169.

8
. Frank Bidart,
Desire
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 13.

9
. Introduction to
The Harlem Cycle
, Vol. 3, pp. xii–xiii.

10
.
My Life of Absurdity
, p. 155.

11
. Quoted by Julia Wright, foreword to Harrington, p. xiii.

12
. Milliken, p. 305.

13
. Ibid., p. 306.

14
.
Writin' is Fightin'
pp. 130–31.

Bailey, Frankie Y.
Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction
. New York, Westport, and London: Greenwood Press, 1991.

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. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Baldwin, James.
Collected Essays
. New York: Library of America, 1998.

______. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985
. New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1985.

Bell, Bernard W.
The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition
. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

Berry, Faith.
Langston Hughes Before and Beyond Harlem
. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1983.

Bone, Robert.
The Negro Novel in America
. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965. (Revised edition of 1958 publication.)

Bontemps, Arna Wendell.
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered
. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1994.

Campbell, James.
Paris Interzone
. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994.

_______. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.

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. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Ellison, Ralph.
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. New York: Random House, 1986.

______. Invisible Man
. New York: The Modern Library, 1994.

______. Shadow and Act
. New York: Random House, 1964.

Fabre, Michel.
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. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

______and Skinner, Robert, eds.
Conversations with Chester Himes
. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Franklin, H. Bruce.
Prison Literature in America
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. (Expanded edition of
The Victim as Criminal and Artist
, Oxford 1978.)

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
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. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Harrington, Oliver W.
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. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Hughes, Carl Milton.
The Negro Novelist
. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990. (Originally published 1953.)

Kostelanetz, Richard, ed.
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. New York: Avon Books, 1964, 1969.

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Chester Himes
. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976.

Margolies, Edward.
Native Sons
. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1968.

_______. Which Way Did He Go?
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______ and Fabre, Michel.
The Several Lives of Chester Himes
. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Martin, Roger, ed.
Hard-Boiled Dicks #8–9
. Paris: L'Introuvable, December 1983. (Special Himes issue.)

Milliken, Stephen F.
Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal
. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976.

Muller, Gilbert H.
Chester Himes
. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

O'Brien, Geoffrey.
Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir
. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.

Palmer, Robert.
Deep Blues
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1981.

Peplow, Michael W.
George Schuyler
. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Rampersand, Arnold.
The Life of Langston Hughes
. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 and 1988.

Reed, Ishmael.
Shrovetide in Old New Orleans
. New York: Atheneum, 1989.

_______. Writin' Is Fightin'
. New York: Atheneum, 1988.

Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher.
The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944–1960
. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992.

Schuyler, George S.
Black No More
. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971.

Silet, Charles L.P., ed.
The Critical Response to Chester Himes
. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Skinner, Robert.
Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes
. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1989.

Soitos, Stephen F.
The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction
. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

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. New York: Warner Books, 1988.

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. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973.

_______. The Man Who Cried I Am
. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994. (Originally published 1967.)

_______. The Most Native of Sons
. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Wright, Richard.
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. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, eds. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.

NOVELS
The Long-Legged Fly
Moth
Black Hornet
Eye of the Cricket
Bluebottle
Death Will Have Your Eyes
Renderings

STORIES
A Few Last Words
Limits of the Sensible World
Time's Hammers: Collected Stories

OTHER
Difficult Lives
Gently into the Land of the Meateaters
Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany
(editor)
Saint Glinglin
by Raymond Queneau (translator)
The Guitar Players
Jazz Guitars
(editor)
The Guitar in Jazz
(editor)

FORTHCOMING
Ghost of a Flea
(novel)
Sorrow's Kitchen
(poems)
Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: Selected Poems 1968–1998

Copyright © 2000 by James Sallis

Electronic edition published in January 2012

First published in the United States of America in 2001 by
Walker Publishing Company, Inc.;
first published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Payback Press, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The chapter title 'Black Ruins of My Life' is from
“The City” by C. P. Cavafy,
Collected Poems
(New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1992), p.28 (“Wherever I turn
I see black ruins of my life”).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-8027-4357-2

Sallis, James, 1944—

Chester Himes: a life / James Sallis.

p. cm.

Includes index.

1. Himes, Chester B., 1909-84. 2. Novelists,

American—20th century—Biography. 3. Afro—

American novelists—Biography. I. Title

PS3515.I713Z84 2000

813.'54—dc21 00-063328