The Autobiography of Chester Himes

The Autobiography of Chester Himes (Masterplots II: African American Literature Series)

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Form and Content

Chester Himes’s autobiographies are at once a record of his life as a black, radical, expatriate writer and a social document disclosing the sufferings of African Americans throughout most of the twentieth century. His life story is central to a study of African American literature, because it explores the pain inflicted upon Himes, pain he was able to convert into powerful literature; because it dramatizes the problems an African American artist, especially a political radical such as Himes, must face in the white publishing world; and because it exposes the...

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