The End of a Primitive: A Novel (Old School Books) - Softcover

Himes, Chester

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393315401 ISBN 13: 9780393315400

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

Jesse Robinson wakes from his nightmare to dirty, fitful real life in a Harlem slum.

Kriss wakes up alone divorced, disillusioned, in her plush Manhattan apartment. They have nothing in common. Just one amazing, passionate weekend in Chicago and a desire to meet again.

About this title

Review:

Chester Himes aficionados who've followed detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones from one grisly Harlem crime scene to the next will find a meaner, harsher reality in The End of a Primitive. In this early work, Himes paints an angry, doomed sexual relationship between a tough-guy black writer down on his luck and a wayward white party girl on a slippery slide toward addiction and abuse. Tough stuff, especially for 1955, when the novel first appeared in a bowdlerized version, and it still carries a tragic punch today, down to its classic pulp diction. Himes, a black writer who did crimes and hard time in his youth, and whose personal quest for a measure of peace finally led him to leave the United States altogether, gives the sure sense of knowing the rough turf and hopeless lives he describes.

From the Back Cover:

Shortly before his death, Chester Himes gave an interviewer this remarkable plot summary of The End of a Primitive. "I put a sexually frustrated American woman and a racially frustrated black American male together for a weekend in a New York apartment, and allowed them to soak in American bourbon. I got the result I was looking for: a nightmare of drunkenness, unbridled sexuality, and in the end, tragedy". This new edition of Himes's most searing and controversial novel restores the cuts he was forced to make in 1955 in order to get the novel published and includes a never-before-printed foreword by Himes himself.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393315401
• ISBN 13: 9780393315400
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208