Crime noir comes to Harlem

I found myself digging through the Chester Himes collection at amazon. He is now included in Penguin Modern Classics,with a half dozen titles re-released a couple years back, including his debut novel, For Love of Imabelle (1957), better known as A Rage in Harlem. I'm not sure if he was the first African-American crime writer, but his books hold up well over time.

Before the lurid crime novels, Himes wrote an account of his prison life in Yesterday Will Make You Cry. It was greatly edited and reduced to pulp fiction in its original edition, Cast the First Stone in 1952, but has since been restored and re-published by Old School Books.

It surprises me that the Library of America hasn't released an omnibus edition of his work, especially since it has recognized other crime writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and David Goodis. But, Mario Van Peebles took it upon himself to re-release Grimes works in omnibus editions back in the late 90s, after the success of the film, A Rage in Harlem.

Probably Grimes' most famous work remains Cotton Comes to Harlem, largely because of the highly successful screen adaptation with Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jaques as Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who featured prominently in many of his novels. The movie was more played for laughs than grit, including Redd Foxx and Cleavon Little. The lead characters actually date back to early magazine pieces he wrote for Abbot's Monthly in the 1930s, the time which many of his stories are set.

Grimes took pulp fiction to an extreme that few other writers have been able to match. His colorful crime novels prefigure blaxploitation films of the 70s and the exploitation films by Quentin Tarantino in the mid 90s. You figure Mario Van Peebles came to Chester Himes through his father Melvin, who directed a film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, which is arguably the best film of the genre.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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