Yesterday Will Make You Cry [a Novel]

Yesterday Will Make You Cry, the story of a young man's brutal sojourn in prison, was first published in 1952 as Cast the First Stone. Author Chester Himes had intended to write a book based on his own prison experiences, but when publisher after publisher turned it down, Himes rewrote the text. He turned his third-person narrative into a first-person narrative, eliminated flashbacks, and toned down the sometimes poetic language. The revision became, so the new editors tell us, "a hard-boiled prison novel." Finally restored in the form of the original novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry is the heartfelt book Himes would have had us read: it is occasionally brutal, always uncompromising, and sometimes harrowingly moving.