RUN MAN RUN by Chester Himes

The author of Cotton Comes to Harlem offers here his most dramatic and thrilling novel. A white undercover cop vents his rage and starts a cycle of violence from which there is no escape.

Walker, one of New York’s embittered policemen, is vicious when drunk. Staggering into a restaurant on a freezing day, he kills two black workers “because they were there,” and pursues a third who witnessed the murders in one of the most suspenseful chases ever put on paper.

Find more street lit by Chester Himes.

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COTTON COMES TO HARLEM by Chester Himes

Black flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement he’s counting on the big Harlem rally to produce a big collection – for his own private charity. But the take - $87,000 is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everybody wants to get his hands on. With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on everyone’s trail and piercing together the complexity of the scheme, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of Hime’s hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.

Check out all of the classic street lit by Chester Himes

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CAST THE FIRST STONE by Chester Himes

James Monroe was young and educated. He stood before the judge and tried to look humble and heard himself sentenced to twenty years in prison….

Here is Chester Himes’s great novel of prison life. It is a story both of brutal debasement and of the slow growth of maturity and compassion. It is a vivid re-creation of a perverse society with its own rules, its own taboos, its own virtues and grotesque vices. And strangely enough, it is also a love story – a love between two men…

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“Old School” October: The Pioneers of Urban Fiction and Street Lit

A few weeks ago, I decided I was going to devote all of October to reading the Godfathers (or Grandfathers) of Street Fiction. Authors like Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, and Chester Himes. Street fiction might not exist if these three authors, and a few others, hadn’t paved the way for the street lit explosion today. In the late 90’s, Norton reprinted a number of urban fiction classics and called them Old School Books:

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