Chester Himes

Hughes, Wright and Ellison were among the writers who befriended Himes when, fresh out of prison, he arrived in New York; Ellison had formerly been in the same class at university as Himes. Wright (by then, the doyen of expatriate black American writers in Paris), welcomed Himes when he moved to Paris, and helped him in many ways. Baldwin, as well as Ellison, was among his colleagues in France. Duhamel, met fortuitously, commissioned, translated and published Himes’ detective stories in his ‘Série noire.’ Himes and his wife fed Van Peebles “for weeks and weeks” in Paris.