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

James Davis

Published by Columbia University Press 2015

Eric Walrond

A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean

James Davis

https://doi.org/10.7312/davi15784

Overview
Contents

About this book

The first biography of a fascinating Caribbean-born writer, unraveling the mystery behind his disappearance from New York at the end of the Harlem Renaissance and recognizing his contribution to the New Negro movement beyond Harlem.

Author / Editor information

James Davis is associate professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College. The recipient of a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he is also the author of Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893–1933.

Reviews

[A] highly readable narrative... excellent, painstakingly researched.

Carole Boyce Davies:
A wonderfully readable book in eleven chapters

James Smethurst:
[An] excellent new biography of Walrond.

Skillfully researched and engagingly composed, the books stands as a discerning recuperation of a paradigmatic but neglected figure.

Well-researched and highly readable.

Douglas Field:
[Davis's] biography provides deft readings of the Harlem Renaissance and the transatlantic Caribbean, while bringing Walrond out of the shadows.

An eloquent biography 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.

Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora:
Davis has given us a rich portrait of the writer who may be the greatest conundrum of the Harlem Renaissance: Eric Walrond. He not only situates the 'sepulchral' brilliance of Walrond's best-known book, Tropic Death, but also recovers a much larger corpus of fugitive articles and stories. As peripatetic (with stops in Barbados, Panama, the United States, Haiti, France, and England) as it was ultimately tragic, Walrond's life may be the single most resonant record of the transnational contours of black culture in the period.

David Levering Lewis, New York University:
Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance. His collection, Tropic Death, was an astonishing succes d'estime. A Guggenheim Fellowship certified the promise of The Big Ditch, Walrond's bildungsroman of capitalism, underdevelopment, and race. In one of the more mysterious losses in American letters, the book never appeared and its author disappeared. James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure, a triumph of archival sleuthing that reintroduces readers to almost everybody known to his peripatetic protagonist.

Michelle Ann Stephens, Rutgers University–New Brunswick:
A great read, even for readers who do not know about the Harlem Renaissance and Eric Walrond. The book tells a fascinating and moving story of a literary talent's demise, or what it takes to nurture and support the literary talents of minority and impoverished writers struggling with their issues of self-esteem and self-confidence while living in straitened circumstances.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Chronology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
Introduction. A Harlem Story, a Diaspora Story Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Guyana Anda Rbados 18(98–1911) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
2. Panama 19( 11–1918) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
3. New Oyrk 19( 18–1923) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
4. The Nwe Ngero (1923–1926) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
5. Tropic Death Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
6. A Person of Tindicstion (1926–1929) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
7. The Caribbean and France (1928–1931) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
8. London I (1931–1939) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
9. Bradford-On-Avon (1939–1952) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
10. Roundway Hospital and the Second Battle (1952–1957) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313
11. London II (1957–1966) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	337
Postscript Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	355
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	359
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	389
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	403

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 440
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 17
- Other: <B>B&W Illus.: </B>17,

eBook

Published: February 24, 2015
ISBN: 9780231538619