The Knightly News

Chester Himes

For many, Chester Himes is the inventor of Black crime novels. But his stories didn’t breed from outsider experience. Serving a 25-year sentence for armed robbery in Ohio, Himes had noticed the segregated and isolating reality of being in prison. But when a fire at his penitentiary killed 300 of his fellow inmates, he was inspired by the dismal episode and started his writing career under his prison number “59623.” Years later, after 8 years of parole, Himes was released from prison and began his journey in illustrating his confinement in a time when the possibility of being a successful African-American novelist was virtually nonexistent. With classics like “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” and “Blind Man with a Pistol,” Himes beautifully portrays his criminal experiences, assimilation in society after years of imprisonment, and post-bellum Los Angeles. “He was the novelist who wrote unapologetically black characters involved in unapologetically black stories set in an unapologetically black Harlem of Himes’ imagination,” said John Hopkins Magazine.