Early 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, and his mother, prior to getting married, was a teacher at
Scotia Seminary. Chester Himes grew up in a middle-class home in Missouri. When he was about 12 years old, his father took a teaching job in the
Arkansas Delta at Branch Normal College (now
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), and soon a tragedy took place that would profoundly shape Himes's view of race relations. He had misbehaved and his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to conduct during a school assembly. Working alone, Joseph mixed the chemicals; they exploded in his face. Rushed to the nearest hospital, the blinded boy was refused treatment because of
Jim Crow laws. "That one moment in my life hurt me as much as all the others put together", Himes wrote in his autobiography
The Quality of Hurt. The family later settled in
Cleveland, Ohio. His parents' marriage was unhappy and eventually ended in divorce.
Prison and literary beginnings In 1925, Himes's family left Pine Bluff and relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended
East High School. He attended
Ohio State University where he became a member of
Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, but was expelled for playing a prank. In late 1928, he was arrested and sentenced to jail and hard labor for 20 to 25 years for
armed robbery and sent to
Ohio Penitentiary. In prison, he wrote short stories and had them published in national magazines. He stated that
writing in prison and being published was a way to earn respect from guards and fellow inmates, as well as to avoid violence. His first stories appeared in 1931 in
The Bronzeman and, starting in 1934, in
Esquire. His story "To What Red Hell" (published in
Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel
Cast the First Stone – only much later republished unabridged as
Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) – dealt with the catastrophic prison fire Himes witnessed at
Ohio Penitentiary in 1930. In 1934, Himes was transferred to
London Prison Farm and in April 1936 was released on parole into his mother's custody. Following his release, he worked at part-time jobs while continuing to write. During this period, he came into contact with
Langston Hughes, who facilitated Himes's entree into the world of literature and publishing. In 1937, Himes married Jean Johnson.
First books 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
Lonely Crusade (1947), which charted the experiences of
the great migration, drawn by the city's defense 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: Back on the East Coast Himes received a scholarship at the
Yaddo artists' community, where he stayed and worked in May and June 1948, in a room opposite
Patricia Highsmith's.
Emigration to France Himes separated from his wife, Jean, in 1952, and the following year he began a period of travels by boarding a ship to France. By the 1950s, he had decided to settle permanently in France, a country he liked in part due to his popularity in literary circles. In
Paris, Himes was friends with his contemporaries; the political cartoonist
Oliver Harrington and fellow
expatriate writers
Richard Wright,
James Baldwin and
William Gardner Smith. In Paris in the late 1950s Chester met his second wife, Lesley Packard, when she interviewed him for the
Herald Tribune; she wrote a fashion column there under the name of "Monica". He described her as "Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very good looking"; he also saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley: "You're the only true color-blind person I've ever met in my life." After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, Lesley quit her job and nursed him back to health. She cared for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, as the director
Melvin Van Peebles dubbed her, "his watchdog". After a long engagement, they were married in 1978, Lesley and Chester faced adversities as a
mixed-race couple, but they prevailed. Their circle of political colleagues and creative friends included towering figures
Langston Hughes,
Richard Wright,
Malcolm X,
Carl Van Vechten,
Picasso,
Jean Miotte,
Ollie Harrington,
Nikki Giovanni,
Ishmael Reed and
John A. Williams. Williams based the main character of his 1967 novel
The Man Who Cried I Am on Himes. Bohemian life in Paris would in turn lead Lesley and Chester to the South of France and finally on to Spain, where they lived until Chester's death in 1984.
Later life and death In 1969, Himes moved to
Moraira, Spain, where he died in 1984 from
Parkinson's disease, at the age of 75. He is buried at
Benissa cemetery. == Critical reception and biography ==