Eric Walrond
A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Eric Walrond (1898–1966) was a writer, journalist, caustic critic, and fixture of 1920s Harlem. His short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. Restoring Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, this biography situates Tropic Death within the author's broader corpus and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America.
James Davis follows Walrond from the West Indies to Panama, New York, France, and finally England. He recounts his relationships with New Negro authors such as Countée Cullen, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as the white novelist Carl Van Vechten. He also recovers Walrond's involvement with Marcus Garvey's journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal Opportunity and examines the writer's work for mainstream venues, including Vanity Fair.
In 1929, Walrond severed ties with Harlem, but he did not disappear. He contributed to the burgeoning anticolonial movement and print culture centered in England and fueled by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Caribbean expatriates. His history of Panama, shelved by his publisher during the Great Depression, was the first to be written by a West Indian author. Unearthing documents in England, Panama, and the United States, and incorporating interviews, criticism of Walrond's fiction and journalism, and a sophisticated account of transnational black cultural formations, Davis builds an eloquent and absorbing narrative of an overlooked figure and his creation of modern American and world literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Why isn't Walrond, a contemporary of Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, better known today? Davis (Commerce in Color) seeks to remedy this neglect with an eloquent biography that draws on newly available archival materials, interviews, and a growing interest in transnational black writing. He vividly narrates Walrond's life from his birth in 1898 in British Guiana and childhood in Barbados and Panama, to his early days as a journalist for Panama's Star & Herald, to his move to Harlem at age 20. From there the narrative covers Walrond's early writings for Marcus Garvey's Negro World, the failure of his marriage, and the success of his first and only collection of stories, Tropic Death, published in 1926. Four years later, Walrond left the U.S., slowly descending into obscurity during successive moves to Paris, the Caribbean, and finally England. There, beset by depression, he spent several years in a mental hospital during the mid-1950s, followed by his death in 1966. Davis's careful and meticulous research re-establishes Walrond as one of the first black writers to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction, putting him alongside his peers in the Harlem Renaissance.
