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Portrait of Chester Himes Photo: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images (1970)

Sample of authors

Himes, Chester

Chester Bomar Himes was among the foremost Afro-American authors, especially in terms of the way he wrote about racism in America in all its guises. He caused a great deal of attention as an author of crime fiction in France in the 1950s. However, his stories about the lives of blacks and Latinos living in urban ghettos were not beginning to be discussed seriously in the United States until...

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Literary figures

Dave Robicheaux

Gender: Male

After having been a soldier in Vietnam and a detective in New Orleans, he struggled for many years with his addiction to alcohol. He managed it, and became a boat renter and a private detective in Louisiana. Time after time, he is caught up in murder cases, described in a long row of novels by James Lee Burke. The middle-aged Dave Robicheaux has married three times: his first wife was murdered,...

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