Vidia S. Naipaul -- Born 1932 in Trinidad. Educated in Trinidad and Oxford University. Publications include The Mystic Masseur (a novel, 1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (a novel, 1958), Miguel Street (collection of stories, 1959), A House for Mr. Miswas (a novel, 1961), The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited ( nonfiction, 1962), Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (a novel, 1963), An Area of Darkness: An Expression of India (non-fiction, 1964).

Miguel Street, Naipaul's third book, contains a number of stories about the inhabitants of a fictional street. Though humorous, the book is about frustrated lives and wasted ambitions in a limiting society. His characters are vivid and individual. 

John Hearne -- Born 1926 in Canada. Educated in Jamaica, at Edinburgh and London University. Publications include Voices under the Window (a novel, 1955), Stranger at the Gate (a novel, 1956), The Faces of Love (a novel, 1957), The Autumn Equinox (a novel, 1959), Land of the Living (a novel, 1961).

In Voices Under the Window, Mark Lattimer who looks white is the hero. But he has "black blood," with a "part-slave ancestry. Mark is caught up in a riot by the unemployed of a West Indian island and is "mortally wounded by a dope-crazed rioter." This happens in the first chapter and in the final chapter Mark dies.

The main character of Black Lightning is Jake, "a gifted artist-blacksmith who discovers that a man cannot stand alone . . . . When Jake finds out that the individual human being is not complete in himself, he commits suicide. There is something aristocratic about Jake, and the novel makes us feel that in this case, suicide is the only solution to the human dilemma" (Marchand, p. 170)

Jan Carew -- Born 1925 in British Guiana. Educated in British Guiana, at Howard University (1945-46), University of Western Reserve (1946-47, Charles University (Prague, Czechoslovakia; 1949-50). Plays broadcast on the BBC. Publications include Black Midas (a novel, 1958), The Last Barbarian (a novel, 1961), Moscow Is Not My Mecca (nonfiction, 1964).

"Black Midas is a robust tale, full of spectacular events. it is firmly held in its Guianese setting by the vivid descriptions of Guianese scenery and wild-life, by the skilful sketching of the pattern of the pork-knocker's life.

But the story of Ocean Shark, dispossessed, unsettled and restless is also a story of the search for the gold of self-knowledge and self-discovery. Its appeal and echo is not restricted by its Guianese setting.

In the story Kanaima, Wilson expressed "a certain condition or experience of man in the world. It is universal. It is in this sense that the stumbling, precariously perched woman is  a symbol, 'the groping muse of all their humanity. The figures in the story are experiencing a kind of break-up of the old forms of their lives--hence the drought, the disappearance of game, the fire, and the withering and dying everywhere."