Old school books

In 1937 Chester Himes, newly released from a seven-year stretch in the Ohio State Penitentiary for grand larceny, began his first novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry. By turns brutal and lyrical and never less than totally honest, it tells the autobiographical story of young Jimmy Monroe's passage through the prison system, which tests the limits of his sanity, his capacity for suffering, and his definition of love. Stunningly candid about racism, homosexuality, and prison corruption, the book would take sixteen years and four subsequent revisions before being published in a much-altered form as Cast the First Stone in 1953. Even bowdlerized, it was recognized as a sardonic masterpiece of debasement and transfiguration. This edition, the first hardcover publication in Norton's Old School Books series, presents for the first time the book precisely as Himes intended it to be read, with its raw honesty and startling compassion entirely intact.

Larry Jackson, better known as Daddy Cool, is a ruthlessly efficient black hit man, equally effective with a gun or a knife in nailing his prey. The only thing that can melt his icy heart is his love for his teenage daughter Janet. But when the smooth talking youngblood pimp Ronald lures her into his stable, Daddy Cool must go into action with a fearsome vengeance.

The Angry Ones is a powerful story of the hidden and (unacknowledged) racism that faces an educated black man in the professional world and the painful truths that warp interracial sex. Steve Hill, a young black army officer, travels east from California to New York in search of a simple dream: a secure job with a future. He lands a position as a publicity director for a vanity press, and his experiences soon rip the facade of hypocrisy and condescension from a liberal and superficially hip society with its own peculiar political and sexual agendas. Based on the author's own experiences, The Angry Ones is a searing look at the hidden conflicts and compromises underlying black-white relations.

Mama Black Widow tells the story of Otis Tilson, a comely and tragic homosexual queen adrift with his brothers and sisters in the dark, labyrinthine world of pimping, tricking, violence, and petty crime. Written in the jagged, vivid, and always authentic language of the homosexual underworld and the black ghetto, Mama Black Widow is a tour of a predatory urban hell. This is Iceberg Slim's profound and disturbing masterpiece, a howl of despair from the tortured margins of urban America.

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.