From the acclaimed author of the Harlem Detectives series, a powerful autobiographical novel about a black family tortured by colorism as it strives to live up to the myth of the Black middle class in white, post-war America
Lillian Taylor has three sons, a comfortable house, and a well-liked husband who teaches at a local college. But her contempt for her family’s dark complexion infects this bright world until it begins to come undone. As one troubling incident leads to another, her husband is pushed to an ever more precarious existence and her best-loved son, Charles, sinks into a life of vice in the perilous borderland between black and white society. With piercing insight and emotional depth, The Third Generation chronicles the unraveling of a black family plagued by the pernicious psychological effects of racism.
Praise for Chester Himes's The Third Generation
“Chester Himes is a novelist of considerable power. . . . His searing book, with its terrible pathos of the oppressed set against each other, shows how increasingly firm a position he deserves among American novelists.” —The New York Times
“By far the most intense and compassionate probing of the psychological predicament of a middle-class Negro family yet written.” —Ralph Ellison
From the acclaimed author of the Harlem Detectives series, a powerful autobiographical novel about a black family tortured by colorism as it strives to live up to the myth of the Black middle class in white, post-war America
Lillian Taylor has three sons, a comfortable house, and a well-liked husband who teaches at a local college. But her contempt for her family’s dark complexion infects this bright world until it begins to come undone. As one troubling incident leads to another, her husband is pushed to an ever more precarious existence and her best-loved son, Charles, sinks into a life of vice in the perilous borderland between black and white society. With piercing insight and emotional depth, The Third Generation chronicles the unraveling of a black family plagued by the pernicious psychological effects of racism.
Praise
Praise for Chester Himes's The Third Generation
“Chester Himes is a novelist of considerable power. . . . His searing book, with its terrible pathos of the oppressed set against each other, shows how increasingly firm a position he deserves among American novelists.” —The New York Times
“By far the most intense and compassionate probing of the psychological predicament of a middle-class Negro family yet written.” —Ralph Ellison
