SOURCE: "Himes and self-hatred," in TLS, No. 4734, December 24, 1993, p. 17.

In the following review, Campbell discusses Himes's The Collected Stories and Plan B.

Chester Himes lived a life of almost constant agitation—Harlem, Paris, Spain—settling only once: to serve seven years of a twenty to twenty-five-year sentence in the Ohio State Penitentiary, the outcome of an armed robbery staged single-handed in a prosperous white neighbourhood in Cleveland. Nineteen when he entered prison in 1929, Himes had already been a thief, a pimp, a bootlegger, and a student at the [Ohio State University]. In prison, he switched to writing fiction, publishing his first short stories in Esquire and the black journal, Crisis.

The beginning and end of Himes's fifty-year literary career (he gave up the other one) are marked out by these two books: The Collected Stories contains sixty stories, probably all the short pieces he ever wrote, including previously...