they held a joint appointment at Georgia State College and then taught at a number of other colleges in the South,including Tuskegee University in Macon County,in Alabama.Chester sensed that the tension in his parents'
marriage was reflection of the struggle between white and African-American
manifested in his mama's light complexion and his daddy's dark one.These perceptions which were not shared by Chester's sibling's,provided the backdrop for his novel The Third Generation (1954),and the themes of race,sex,and power recur throughout both his life and work.
When Chester was twelve years old,his brother Joseph nearly blinded himself
in a chemistry experiment gone awry and was refused medical treatment at
the local white hospital.After graduating from Glenville High School in 1926,
Chester was working at a Cleveland hotel to earn money for college when he
accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft,fracturing three vertebra es.He,
too, was denied entry to a white hospital.When he entered Ohio State University in the fall,still wearing a back brace,he was scarred physically
and emotionally.He had gained admission to the university in part because a
grade of fifty-six he had received in one course was mistakenly recorded on his transcript as eight-six; nevertheless,it was later found that he had the fourth-highest IQ any student entering that year.Chester was more interested in the illicit activities he found in the African-American underworld and in the superficial aspects of campus life than he was in his studies.
At the end of his semester,the highest he could muster was a C in English.The
shady individuals he associated with later appeared as characters in his crime novels,in 1927,keeping such company merely helped to get him expelled.
Back on the streets of Cleveland,Chester's delinquent behavior came to including soliciting prostitutes,gambling,and forging checks. His parents,
who were going through a divorce,could stop his downwaed spiral-though his nearly blind brother was on his way to graduating magna cum laude from Oberlin College and earning a PhD. After two prior arrests in 1928 he was sentenced to twenty to twenty five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for
an armed robbery he committed against a white couple.In 1930 the prison was engulfed in a fire that killed more than three hundred inmates.Chester
wrote a story about this tragedy called " To What Red Hell," which was published in Esquire in 1934. From then on Chester considered himself a writer.His novel Cast the First Stone (1954) draws heavily on his prison experience,exploring the problems of crime and punishment and exposing the realities of prison life.Run Man Run (1966) presents the absurdity of the "Negro" condition as he saw it-a state of being imprisoned and paralyzed within a racist society.
A year after his release from prison in 1936,Chester married Jean Lucinda Johnson.During the Depression he found work as a laborer with the Works Progress Administration Chester was soon assigned to the Ohio Writer's Project,where he worked on a history of Cleveland and wrote an unsigned column for the Cleveland Daily News.During this period he met and befriended Langston Hughes,who assisted his writing career.In 1940 Chester and Lucinda moved to Los Angeles to work as a butler and maid for the novelist Louis Bromfield,whom they hoped would help further Chester's career.When this did not happen,Chest found work in the shipyards and in war industry plants,while Lucinda found a position with slightly higher wages and status.His frustration with bigotry,liberals, union organizers, communists,and the African-Americans he encountered at the NAACP, as well
as his low opinion of women,found fictional representation in his most ambitious novels, If he Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947).
A Rosenwald Fellowship allowed Chester to move to New York in 1944 to write full-time.His work received mixed reviews and sold so poorly that when the money ran out,Chester sometimes worked as a caretaker or bellhop to survive.He separated from Lucinda in 1952 and began a series of relationships with white women-including a violent with Vandi Haywood that became the basis for A Case of Rape (1984). first published in French in 1963.Chester wrote that "the very essence of any relationships with between a black man and a white woman in the United States is "sex (Muller,1965).This
sentiment gave both The End of a Primitive (1955),which Chester considered
to be his work,and the satirical Pinktoes (1961) a racial edge that was too
unsettling for most Americans.
By the early 1950s Chester had become a disappoint with the United States that he went to Europe and became one of many Americans expatriate writers live in Paris.Right Wright helped Chester make his European transition,
assisting him professionally and introducing him to James Baldwin, though
Chester considered Richard a rival as much as a friend and preferred to invite comparisons of his own work to William Faulkner's.He lived peripatetic existence in Europe,taking up with several women before meeting an English
colomnist,Lesley Packard,in 1958;the two were married in 1965.His writing
career entered a new and unexpected phase when the French editor and translator Marcel Duhamel suggested that Chester write commercial detective novels.In 1958 his first,attempt For Love of Imabelle, won the French Grand Prix for the year's best detective novel.
At first Chester considered his detective novels to be lucrative projects that he could churn out quickly in order to support his "serious" writing.He did not
expect that The Real Cool Killers (1959),The Crazy Kill (1959),The Big Gold Dream (1960),All Shot Up (1960), and Blind Man with a pisol (1969) would become popular as they did.Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) was made into a movie directed by Ossie Davis in 1970,and The Heat's On (1965) became the
movie Come Back,Charleston,Blue in 1974.In Grave Digger Jones and his partner Coffin Ed Johnson, Chester created compelling characters who dispense their own brand of black justice and who had been been compared to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. With these books helped to pioneer a new genre of African-American mystery writing that continues with such writers as Walter Mosley and Nora Deloach.
He lived the last sixteen years of his life in Spain,where he struggled with a variety of geriatric illnesses.He rarely visited the United States, he never stayed anyplace in Europe long enough,or learned or to speak any of the languages well enough,to consider Europe his home. In his final years,often writing in great arthritic pain,he finished two autobiographies The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absuridity (1976).
When Chester was twelve years old,his brother Joseph nearly blinded himself
in a chemistry experiment gone awry and was refused medical treatment at
the local white hospital.After graduating from Glenville High School in 1926,
Chester was working at a Cleveland hotel to earn money for college when he
accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft,fracturing three vertebra es.He,
too, was denied entry to a white hospital.When he entered Ohio State University in the fall,still wearing a back brace,he was scarred physically
and emotionally.He had gained admission to the university in part because a
grade of fifty-six he had received in one course was mistakenly recorded on his transcript as eight-six; nevertheless,it was later found that he had the fourth-highest IQ any student entering that year.Chester was more interested in the illicit activities he found in the African-American underworld and in the superficial aspects of campus life than he was in his studies.
At the end of his semester,the highest he could muster was a C in English.The
shady individuals he associated with later appeared as characters in his crime novels,in 1927,keeping such company merely helped to get him expelled.
Back on the streets of Cleveland,Chester's delinquent behavior came to including soliciting prostitutes,gambling,and forging checks. His parents,
who were going through a divorce,could stop his downwaed spiral-though his nearly blind brother was on his way to graduating magna cum laude from Oberlin College and earning a PhD. After two prior arrests in 1928 he was sentenced to twenty to twenty five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for
an armed robbery he committed against a white couple.In 1930 the prison was engulfed in a fire that killed more than three hundred inmates.Chester
wrote a story about this tragedy called " To What Red Hell," which was published in Esquire in 1934. From then on Chester considered himself a writer.His novel Cast the First Stone (1954) draws heavily on his prison experience,exploring the problems of crime and punishment and exposing the realities of prison life.Run Man Run (1966) presents the absurdity of the "Negro" condition as he saw it-a state of being imprisoned and paralyzed within a racist society.
A year after his release from prison in 1936,Chester married Jean Lucinda Johnson.During the Depression he found work as a laborer with the Works Progress Administration Chester was soon assigned to the Ohio Writer's Project,where he worked on a history of Cleveland and wrote an unsigned column for the Cleveland Daily News.During this period he met and befriended Langston Hughes,who assisted his writing career.In 1940 Chester and Lucinda moved to Los Angeles to work as a butler and maid for the novelist Louis Bromfield,whom they hoped would help further Chester's career.When this did not happen,Chest found work in the shipyards and in war industry plants,while Lucinda found a position with slightly higher wages and status.His frustration with bigotry,liberals, union organizers, communists,and the African-Americans he encountered at the NAACP, as well
as his low opinion of women,found fictional representation in his most ambitious novels, If he Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947).
A Rosenwald Fellowship allowed Chester to move to New York in 1944 to write full-time.His work received mixed reviews and sold so poorly that when the money ran out,Chester sometimes worked as a caretaker or bellhop to survive.He separated from Lucinda in 1952 and began a series of relationships with white women-including a violent with Vandi Haywood that became the basis for A Case of Rape (1984). first published in French in 1963.Chester wrote that "the very essence of any relationships with between a black man and a white woman in the United States is "sex (Muller,1965).This
sentiment gave both The End of a Primitive (1955),which Chester considered
to be his work,and the satirical Pinktoes (1961) a racial edge that was too
unsettling for most Americans.
By the early 1950s Chester had become a disappoint with the United States that he went to Europe and became one of many Americans expatriate writers live in Paris.Right Wright helped Chester make his European transition,
assisting him professionally and introducing him to James Baldwin, though
Chester considered Richard a rival as much as a friend and preferred to invite comparisons of his own work to William Faulkner's.He lived peripatetic existence in Europe,taking up with several women before meeting an English
colomnist,Lesley Packard,in 1958;the two were married in 1965.His writing
career entered a new and unexpected phase when the French editor and translator Marcel Duhamel suggested that Chester write commercial detective novels.In 1958 his first,attempt For Love of Imabelle, won the French Grand Prix for the year's best detective novel.
At first Chester considered his detective novels to be lucrative projects that he could churn out quickly in order to support his "serious" writing.He did not
expect that The Real Cool Killers (1959),The Crazy Kill (1959),The Big Gold Dream (1960),All Shot Up (1960), and Blind Man with a pisol (1969) would become popular as they did.Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) was made into a movie directed by Ossie Davis in 1970,and The Heat's On (1965) became the
movie Come Back,Charleston,Blue in 1974.In Grave Digger Jones and his partner Coffin Ed Johnson, Chester created compelling characters who dispense their own brand of black justice and who had been been compared to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. With these books helped to pioneer a new genre of African-American mystery writing that continues with such writers as Walter Mosley and Nora Deloach.
He lived the last sixteen years of his life in Spain,where he struggled with a variety of geriatric illnesses.He rarely visited the United States, he never stayed anyplace in Europe long enough,or learned or to speak any of the languages well enough,to consider Europe his home. In his final years,often writing in great arthritic pain,he finished two autobiographies The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absuridity (1976).
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