Not since D. H. Lawrence's Sons & Lovers has the desperate tie between a mother & son been revealed with such agonizing power & psychological depth. Charles's mother looks white & feels white, but she is unalterably black, & hates it. Embittered & domineering, she is revolted by her husband's dark skin, scornful of his middle-class success-all her hopes center on her son. Charles has inherited her light skin & her rage-a rage that will catapult him past two societies into a violent no-man's-land of self-destruction. The heartbreaking love between these two mounts to tragic crisis as Charles, unable to adjust to black or white society, enters a nether world of vicious debauchery & self-ruin. The Third Generation is Chester Himes's great novel of a young man driven by both bitter love & passionate hate for his own heritage. Chester Himes is the author of novels, short stories, essays, & films, & is well know for his classic Harlem crime series, which includes Cotton Comes to Harlem. Himes began to write while serving a prison term for jewel theft in the early 1940s, emigrated to France in 1953, & later to Spain, where he died in 1984.