Cotton Comes To Harlem Analysis

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Chester Himes is quite the character, an everyday person. Despite having spent 16 years in prison for an alleged armed robbery, he still managed to become a successful novel writer. Criticized for his so many and conflicting writing genres, Himes wrote about the current events of the time that people then could closely relate too. The skill in Himes’s prophetic writing style, common in the Modernist time period, earns people to refer to him as the “father of black crime fiction”. In Cotton Comes to Harlem, Chester Himes uses imagery and symbolism to express the poverty in Harlem during the Modernism time period.
Chester Himes’s was full of struggles and experiences that influenced his writing. Son of Estelle and Joseph Himes, Chester Himes was born on July 29, 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri, a small town between Saint Louis and Kansas City. Himes’ mother was a school teacher, and his father a blacksmith. In 1928 Himes …show more content…
Instead of pointing out the positives in an individual, modernist see the decay and alienation of an individual, race, etc. War played a major part in the change of mindset of many writers. The modernist believed the last generation's way of thought was coming to a cultural dead end. “They wrote as if they could foresee the that the world were spiraling into unknown territory”(Modernism,1). Which is seen in Himes’s works with his prophetic writing style. Himes wrote during the Harlem Renaissance which he even incorporates it in some of his detective novels. Writers wrote to be heard in a time where everyone was trying to be “normal”, many writers wanted to be heard and eventually won the struggle. Yet writers who didn’t conform to the popular taste were often alienated from mainstream society. Chester Himes early on was one of these writers whose works could never get published. He was trying to shine light on what really happens in prison, which no publishers wanted to be criticized for
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