Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean

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. [em](Feb.) [/em]