Eric Walrond
A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean
by James Davis
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Pub Date Feb 24 2015 | Archive Date Apr 13 2015
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.
Recasting Walrond's personal and professional trajectory, James Davis follows the author from the West Indies to Panama to New York, France, and finally England. He intimately 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; addresses his involvement with Marcus Garvey's journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal Opportunity; and examines Walrond'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.
James Davis is associate professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College. The recipient of a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for the Study of Biography, he is also the author of Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893–1933.
Advance Praise
"A great read, even for readers who do not know about the Harlem Renaissance and Eric Walrond. It 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." -- Michelle Ann Stephens, Associate Professor of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University--New Brunswick
"The time is now for this biography of Walrond. Eric Walrond will unquestionably make an original and significant contribution to the fields of African American and Caribbean literary studies, transnational studies, and Diaspora studies. It is the only existing biography of Walrond, and does an admirable job of not only presenting solid research on its subject but also thinking through the complexity of Walrond’s particular contribution and role in twentieth-century black transnational and Diaspora history and culture." -- Gary Edward Holcomb, Professor of African American Literature, Department of African American Studies, Ohio UniversityAvailable Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780231157841 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
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