Photo: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images (1999)
Sample of authors
Crumley, James
The American author and teacher James Arthur Crumley never reached bestseller status. However, he was instrumental in the development of hardboiled crime fiction from the 1970s onwards.
Crumley was born at Three Rivers, southern Texas. His father was an oil field foreman and his mother a waitress. The family was poor; his mother forced her son to attend church, but she never went herself since...
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...