Himes--America’s Neglected ‘Balzac’

One of the best and continually underrated of African-American novelists, Chester Himes began to write while serving a 7 1/2-year sentence in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery.

Himes harbored a dissatisfaction with the racial situation in this country that led to a self-exile in France and Spain.

A suggestion in the mid-1950s from an editor friend in Paris that he try his hand at detective fiction resulted in what Himes came to call his “Harlem domestic stories,” a series of nine crime novels that, though largely neglected in the United States, made him, in his own words, “the most celebrated writer in France who couldn’t speak French.”

Ironically, though Himes became known as “the Balzac of Harlem,” he apparently didn’t know the actual Harlem as well as his books would indicate. He was, however, intimately familiar with the culture of black ghetto life, had known violence during his prison experience (“Two black convicts cut each other to death over a dispute as to whether Paris was in France or France in Paris”) and had a style that matched the powerful and conflicting emotions he felt about the world his people had to live in.