Chester Himes: A Life

Expatriate African American writer Chester Himes's complicated life is the subject of a biography published in 2000 by detective novelist James Sallis, a longtime Himes champion. Sallis's biography weighs in at 368 pages. It is readable despite numerous repetitions and some awkwardness about introducing other figures in Himes's life, but Sallis's book does not seem to be based on any new research and relies almost entirely on reviews contemporary to the original publications of Himes's book augmented by what academic critics have written. It is very odd that Sallis provides so little of his own reading of Himes's writing. The biographical research on which Sallis draws very, very heavily and without citation is the discerning and more succinct (209-page) 1997 biography by Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, _The Several Lives of Chester Himes_. Margolies and Fabre knew Himes in his later years and did serious biographical research on Himes (and other black American expatriates to France, especially Richard Wright, who helped Himes in many ways when he moved to Paris). Sallis adds no discernible research and does not make more sense of Himes than they did, so I would recommend the Margolies and Fabre biography in preference to the Sallis one (and on Himes's writing, Stephen Milliken's 1976 book _Chester Himes_). One may read both biographies and both volumes of Himes' "memoirs" and still wonder "Who was this guy?" and "What made him tick?" (Himes's own answer was "hurt," but the way he deployed the category made it all but meaningless.)