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He's got a fancier title but no power whatsoever. The prejudice that Bob Jones experiences on the job goes well beyond whispers behind his back or even name calling. You're talking about a confined space in the bowels of a half built ship and men working with heavy tools. There is the threat, more often unstated but at times quite overt, of physical violence. And there's a lot of sexual tension because this one woman, Madge, is flirting with Bob but there's almost a hostility behind the flirting This would be an incredibly claustrophobic place for him to try and earn a living and even retain a shred of dignity.
He's just been promoted to what they call leaderman , meaning he's supervising other people, including many, if not most of them, a lot of white racists who don't particularly love this. This is Himes' first book and was written while he was prison. Remember me. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice. A black son of a bitch destroying himself because of a no-good white slut…It was so funny because it didn't make sense. New Softcover Quantity Available: 1. In some cases, people were able to see past this racism and view the war as a way to unite people to think of the greater good.
This is a punchy, staccato, propulsive novel And then, the book ends in a chase in which the physics of it, the sheer spatial design of it, it is instantly visual in a reader's brain Bob is simmering and at a certain point, he can't take it anymore. And so the novel heads toward a real eruption of a climax. It's a picture of Los Angeles that seems familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
There are at least two ways to look at this. You could look back at the Los Angeles of "If He Hollers Let Him Go" and think, oh my god, what an absolutely, starkly, violently divided city that was. As bad as things may sometimes look nowadays, look at the progress we've made.
Are we not passed this now? And so for that reason, this is a book that I think we can read today not just as Angelenos with affection but also as people living in a flawed society looking for antecedents from which to find some sort of bumbling way forward.
If He Hollers Let Him Go is the first novel by American writer Chester Himes, published in , about an African-American shipyard worker in Los Angeles. If He Hollers, Let Him Go! is a American crime film written and directed by Charles Martin, based on the novel of the same title by Chester Himes.
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This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper , Senior Editor. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Chester Himes. Chester Himes , African-American writer whose novels reflect his encounters with racism. As an expatriate in Paris, he published a series of black detective novels. The domination of his dark-skinned father by his light-skinned…. Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting.
Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an….
American literature, the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States.