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| 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. |
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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 middle of the book consists of a series
of flashbacks in which the dying man re-lives some of the
incidents and events in his past which have made him the man he
is. . . . The novel seems to deal in part with the dilemma of a
man like Mark in a society where the automatic responses to
colour tend to overshadow the behaviour of the individual and to
work against the possibilities of personal relationship" (Ramchand,
p. 157-158). |
| Roger Mais -- Born 1905 in Jamaica. Died
1955. Painter, Dramatist, and Poet. Publications include novels
--
The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953),
Brother Man
(1954), and
Black Lightning
(1955).
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) |
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| But the novel contains a complementary story: the
relationship of Glen and Miriam, who are attracted to each other
but always tend to resist each other. "But if for Jake the
only acceptable end is suicide, for Glen and Miriam, a tentative
solution, hesitantly arrived at, is the acceptance of a love
relationship. Other Mais
Books
Listen, the Wind (1987)
Three Novels of Roger Mais (1966)
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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. its 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. |
| Theodore Wilson Harris -- Born 1921
in British Guiana. Educated in British Guiana. publications
include novels --
The Palace of the Peacock (1960),
The
Far Journey of Oudin (1961),
The Whole Armour
(1962),
The Secret Ladder (1963), Heartland ((1964),
and
The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965).
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." |
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