Eric Walrond was a Guyana-born, Barbados-raised writer and journalist who became a notable figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in 1898 in Georgetown, British Guiana, he spent his boyhood moving among Barbados, British Guiana, and Panama, where he worked as a journalist and government clerk during the construction era of the Panama Canal. This Caribbean and Central American upbringing gave him a wide, multilingual view of black life across the hemisphere, which set him apart from many of his Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. He moved to New York in the early 1920s, settling in Harlem and working as a writer and editor. He served as business manager for Marcus Garvey's Negro World and later became an associate editor at Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League, where he published essays, reviews, and short fiction. Walrond's major literary achievement was Tropic Death, a 1926 collection of short stories set in the Caribbean and Central America, written in a style that captured black vernacular speech and depicted the harsh realities of poverty, labor, and colonialism in the tropics. The book was praised for its lush, impressionistic prose and was considered one of the more formally adventurous works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Despite early acclaim, Walrond never completed another book-length work of fiction. He left the United States in the late 1920s on a Guggenheim Fellowship intended to support research on the Panama Canal's social history, and he settled permanently in Britain by the 1930s. There he continued publishing journalism and essays but produced no further major creative work before his death in London in 1966. Literary historians regard him as an important though underrecognized figure whose Caribbean-centered perspective broadened the geographic and cultural scope of the Harlem Renaissance beyond its usual focus on the United States.
10 works on Textopian