Lawrence P. Jackson

“Although Chester wrote about Harlem and black workers struggling to get ahead, he was reared in the Deep South and Cleveland, the middle-class child of college teachers. He was the first twentieth-century black American to walk the path of petty criminal and convict turned dynamic writer that would later make celebrities out of Malcolm X, Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Beck, Nathan McCall, and several others. Himes’s early novels—If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), The Third Generation (1953), and The Primitive (1955)—revealed a fundamentally racist American society less inclined to lynch blacks but preferring to dismantle them psychologically.”
― Lawrence P. Jackson, Chester B. Himes: A Biography