s depiction of black culture and its relation to the larger civilization.
Zora Neale Hurston was also a contemporary of Himes.
Few authors in the black tradition have less in common than Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, and consequently, Hurston and Himes had little in common.
A comparison with Hurston is interesting because it reminds the reader that the pessimism of Naturalism was not the only view afoot during Himes' era.
Hurston, however, chose deliberately to ignore the Naturalistic view of black life.
Chester Himes' Blind Man with a Pistol
In an essay titled "Negro Martyrs are Needed" published in The Crisis in May 1944, Chester Himes offered the planned and organized martyrdom of black citizens in forced confrontations with white authority as the most effective route to equality (Fabre & Skinner x). Fabre & Skinner note, however, that Himes later changed his position, perhaps in response to the more violent revolutionary feelings stirring in America and advocated by such groups as the Black Panthers. Himes' new thesis advocated organized and violent rebellion against the established and dominant white Euro-centric hierarchy (Fabre & Skinner x).
Moreover, in the preface to Blind Man, Himes relates a story of a blind man with a pistol that reminded him of "some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers onto getting themselves killed." He a
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