If He Hollers, Let Him Go

The searing debut novel by Chester Himes, ‘written with youthful panache and a bellyful of anger’ (Observer) Robert ‘Bob’ Jones – crew leader, shipyard worker, educated, employed – is finding life impossible. Though he’s recently been promoted to supervisor, he is disrespected and resented by white colleagues; and despite his relationship with the high-class Alice, he is crudely baited by the manipulative Madge. Over the course of four fraught days in Los Angeles, he is plagued with increasingly violent urges as the bigotry and cruelty he faces day-in-day-out become unbearable. Chester Himes’s shattering debut is a masterful reckoning with the poisonous effects of racism, and a monumental protest novel. ‘A relentless, gripping, classic novel, one of the most powerful exposés of what it is like to be black in America’ LA Times