story "To What Red Hell" (published in Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel Cast the First Stone – only much later republished unabridged as Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) – dealt with the catastrophic prison fire Himes witnessed at Ohio Penitentiary in 1930. In 1934 Himes was transferred to London Prison Farm and in April 1936 was released on parole into his mother's custody. Following his release he worked at part-time jobs while continuing to write. During this period he came into contact with Langston Hughes, who facilitated Himes's entree into the world of literature and publishing. In 1937 Himes married Jean Johnson. First books In the 1940s Himes spent time in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter but also producing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and The Lonely Crusade (1947), which charted the experiences of the great migration, drawn by the city's defense industries, and their dealings with the established black community, fellow workers, unions and management. He also provided an analysis of the Zoot Suit Riots for The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. Mike Davis in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, describing the prevalence of racism in Hollywood in the 1940s and '50s, cites Himes' brief career as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, terminated when Jack L. Warner heard about him and said: "I don't want no niggers on this lot." Himes later wrote in his autobiography: Back on the East Coast Himes received a scholarship at the Yaddo artists' community, where he stayed and worked in May and June 1948, in a room just across from where Patricia Highsmith resided. Emigration to France Himes separated from his wife Jean in 1952, and the following year he began a period of travels by boarding a ship to France. By the 1950s he had decided to settle permanently in France, a country he liked in part due to his popularity in literary circles. In Paris, Himes was the contemporary of the political cartoonist Oliver Harrington and fellow expatriate writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Gardner Smith. It was in Paris in the late 1950s that Chester met his second wife, Lesley Himes (née Packard), when she went to interview him. She was a journalist at the Herald Tribune, where she wrote a fashion column, "Monica". He described her as "Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very