Writing Absurdity
Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018
Chester B. Himes: A Biography
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017,978 0 393 06389 9 Show More
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017,
“... On 21 April 1930, a fire broke out in the state penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, a wretched, segregated prison where more than 4000 men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery ... ”