SOURCE: Himes, Chester, and Michel Fabre. “Chester Himes Direct.”¹ In Conversations with Chester Himes, edited by Fabre and Robert E. Jackson, pp. 125-42. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

In the following interview, originally published in 1983 and translated from French by Fabre, Himes discusses topics such as the influence of his largely expatriate life on his writing, settings and themes in his stories, his interest in sexual psychology, and writers who have influenced his work.

[Fabre]: When did you actually begin to write short stories? Did you begin when you started college, or only in the 1930s when you first began to be published?

[Himes]: No, I began writing short stories in the penitentiary. At first, it was a way of escaping from the environment I was living in, although I often wrote about the everyday experiences of the prisoners whose lives I shared.

In my early prison stories...