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Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean
Contributor(s): Davis, James (Author)
ISBN: 0231157843     ISBN-13: 9780231157841
Publisher: Columbia University Press
OUR PRICE:   $41.58  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: February 2015
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | Caribbean & Latin American
- Literary Collections | American - African American
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
Dewey: B
LCCN: 2014029768
Physical Information: 1.4" H x 6" W x 9.1" (1.60 lbs) 440 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - 20th Century
- Ethnic Orientation - African American
- Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
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 Count e 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.