SOURCE: A review of The Collected Stories of Chester Himes, in The Village Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1991, pp. 8-9.

In the following review, Miller favorably reviews The Collected Stories of Chester Himes.

Seven years after his death in Spain, Chester Himes remains as remote from American readers as he was during his lifetime. Celebrated in Europe, particularly in France, where he settled in 1953, Himes has never really been embraced by the U.S. academy, despite the efforts of Hoyt Fuller, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, and others. Even with the canon debates and the present ferment in African-American literary studies, Himes continues to be relegated to the periphery. His work gets one line in Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (though Himes's rendition of black vernacular is one of the best in the business) and but a single mention in Henry Louis Gates's The...