(WPA) job, working for the federal government
first as a laborer, then as a librarian, and later as
a writer recording a history of Cleveland. When
his public assistance ran out, he began working for
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO),
writing histories about the newly formed union
that, for the first time, recruited black workers. At
the Karamu House, a community arts center in
Cleveland, he met LANGSTON HUGHES, who served
as a role model for the aspiring Himes. Periodi-
cally in the 1940s he would visit Hughes in New
York and attend “rent” parties among the Harlem
crowd, where he met RICHARD WRIGHT, CARL VAN
VECHTEN, RALPH ELLISON, Roy Ottley, OWEN DOD-
SON, STERLING BROWN, and others. Many of these
parties were hosted by Himes’s cousin Henry Lee
Moon, prominent in the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, and his
gracious wife Mollie Lewis, the subjects of Himes’s
farcical novella Pinktoes (1961). With the help of
Hughes, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Louis
Bromfield, and other contacts in the labor left,
Himes moved to the West Coast hoping to find
work in the movie industry.
When Himes moved to Los Angeles, the city
was undergoing a major boom from laborers mi-
grating to work in the war plants, causing the city’s
population to double in size during the wartime
1940s. He was promptly rejected by Hollywood
(Jack Warner had ordered, “I don’t want no nig-
gers on this lot”) and joined the pool of workers
flooding into Los Angeles. After the passage of
Roosevelt’s Executive Order #8802 prohibiting
discrimination in the war industries, he was one
of the Negro “firsts” to be promoted into skilled
industrial jobs. In these years, he was closely as-
sociated with the Communist Party, which sent
him to many segregated war factories to test the
antidiscrimination policy. Himes’s interest in
communism was reflected in short stories that fea-
tured proletarian themes and several fiery essays in
which he expressed his hatred for capitalist oppres-
sion, hope for blacks within the union movement,
and support for the Soviet Union. A few of these
writings appeared in leftist journals such as New
Masses, Common Ground and War Worker, but the
majority of them appeared in the black periodi-
cals, which climbed in circulation during the war,
such as OPPORTUNITY, CRISIS, and Negro Story.
The blockbuster success of Wright’s Native
Son in 1940 generated a flurry of interest in the
“protest novel” during the 1940s, what some even
called a renaissance, and America looked to black
writers for a solution to the “race problem.” While
their novels were often compared to Wright’s,
black writers such as Himes benefited most from
a more willing white publishing industry that had
been closed to them. Himes’s black noir aesthetic
was apparent in his debut novel IF HE HOLLERS
LET HIM GO (1945), which took readers on a drive
down Central Avenue, the jazz and BLUES district of
Los Angeles, and depicted the wartime racial ten-
sions that were “as thick in the street as gas fumes.”
The main character, Bob Jones, is a black shipyard
worker who witnessed the internment of the Japa-
nese and the attacks on Mexican “zoot-suiters,” all
the while fearing that he might be the next scape-
goat of white racial xenophobia. A second Los
Angeles novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), deals more
directly with the ongoing chasm between black
and white workers that divided the labor left from
within and foreshadows the Cold War repression
that would crush the movement from the outside.
Excoriated by the left and the right, hated by black
and white reviewers alike, Himes attributed the
book’s failure to an act of sabotage and descended
into a five-year writer’s block.
Moving to Paris in 1953, Himes was both
looking for a place to restore his writing energies
and to flee from the communist witch hunt. He
joined other black exiles, many of whom were also
former leftists, on the “black bank” in Paris. He,
Richard Wright, and Ollie Harrington formed a
close friendship (which he satirically portrays in
another novella, A Case of Rape [1963]) and left
a distinct mark on the line of American literary
modernists abroad. In Paris, Himes reinvented
himself, writing what he believed was the master-
piece of his career, The End of Primitive (1956). In
this book he announced the end of the “protest
novel” and his realization of the “absurdity” of
American racism. This absurd vision is repeated
in nine detective novels set in Harlem: A Rage in
Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), The248 Himes, Chester