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Portrait of Desmond Bagley Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1978)

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Bagley, Desmond

British author of thrillers born in Kendal, Cumbria (formerly Westmorland), in northwest England, an area known as the Lake District. His father was a miner who became ill and moved his family to Blackpool when Bagley was about twelve years old. There he ran a boarding house for actors. Desmond Bagley, who suffered from a bad stutter, left school when he was fourteen and worked in odd jobs at a...

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

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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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