The End of a Primitive

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.