Politics and Prose at Busboys and Poets 14th & V welcomes Lawrence P. Jackson to discuss his new book Chester B. Himes: A biography.
Famous for his nine-volume Harlem Detective series and the1945 novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester B. Himes (1909-1984) also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and wrote two volumes of memoirs. In all his work he confronted issues of racism, social justice, and sexuality. In this definitive biography of Himes, Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Indignant Generation, draws on Himes’s papers and on exclusive interviews with Himes’s friends and associates. He traces the story of an exceptional and determined thinker, following Himes from his middle-class Missouri youth to his 1928 conviction for armed robbery, from the prison time during which he started writing to his subsequent acquaintance with Langston Hughes, later friendships with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and on to his cultural legacy.
