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Himes was arrested in September 1928 on the charge of armed robbery and was sentenced to 20 to 25 years of hard labor at Ohio State Penitentiary. He began writing seriously in prison. By the time of his parole in 1937, Himes had published many stories about prison life in Esquire magazine and elsewhere. Upon release, he married his long-time girlfriend Jean Johnson and found work as a research assistant in the Cleveland Public Library. Eventually he was hired by the Ohio State Writers' Project to work on a history of Cleveland. When WWII began, he moved to Los Angeles and began writing novels.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 386-387. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.