If He Hollers Let Him Go (Serpent's Tail Classics) - Softcover

Himes, Chester

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846687381 ISBN 13: 9781846687389

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2010

Synopsis

Robert Jones is a crew leader in a naval shipyard in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He should have a lot going for him, being educated, with a steady job and a steady relationship. But in the four days covered in this novel, the impossibility of life as a black man in a white world is made devastatingly clear.

Jones is surrounded by prejudice, suspicion and paranoia, and his daily experiences influence his thoughts, dreams and behaviour. Immediately recognised as a masterful expose of racism in everyday life, If He Hollers Let Him Go is Chester Himes' first book, originally published in 1945.

About this title

Review

A classic of Afro-American fiction, Chester Himes' first novelIf He Hollers Let Him Go, offers powerful testimony and witness to the poisonous rage and anxieties, the frustration and despair at stunted possibilities of a black "leaderman", Bob Jones. Set in a Cleveland shipyard during the Second World War, the novel reflects the pervasive violence and devastingly perverse paradigms of American racism through the traumatic experiences of Jones who, from the moment he wakes up and drives to work until the moment he returns home and goes to sleep, is literally overwhelmed by the raw, brutal circumstances of Jim Crowism. Finding himself trapped by the unremittingly stark stereotypes of race and his own psychic internalisation of the contradictions, paradoxes and inequities of race, Jones's anguished isolation is communicated through both his strained relations with Alice--his black bourgeois girlfriend--and his illicit, perverse desire for Madge, a Southern white working class woman whose sexual demands result in him being falsely charged with rape. The latter forms the climax to the novel and shows, among other things, how palpably intermingled sex and racism have been (and are) in American society. Jones's pain, awkwardness and discomfort, revealing the price of that intermingling, here dramatised as an emasculated and petrified version of black "manhood". --David Marriott

Review

Youthful, insulting, risky, brash, bad-assed, revolutionary, violent, and struts about as if to say, here come cocky Chester Himes, you litterateurs, and I hope you don't like it (Ishmael Reed)

The greatest, most brutally powerful novel of the best black novelist of his generation (Chicago Tribune)

Hard and fast and sure (New York Review of Books)

Relentless, gripping, classic novel, one of the most powerful exposés of what it is like to be black in America (LA Times)

One of the most important American writers of the twentieth century ... [a] quirky American genius (Walter Mosley)

Himes never soft-pedaled his disdain for the systemic racism of the day or for black integrationists, whom he referred to as "whining beggars" ... One hundred years after his birth, for better and for worse, the great Chester Himes remains nearly one of a kind (John Ridley, Emmy Award winning writer and commentator Huffington Post)

With his first novel, Chester Himes secured his place in the vanguard of the emerging young black writers of his time who were honestly detailing the rigors of black life in America ... If He Hollers Let Him Go is a masterpiece for its bitter and honest portrayal of the life of a normal black man in America (Barnes & Noble)

[Himes] taught me the difference between a black detective and Sherlock Holmes (Ishmael Reed)

America's central American black writer (James Sallis)

Brutal (The Times 2010-11-13)

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1846687381
• ISBN 13: 9781846687389
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272