About the Book
This is the first literary biography of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. It traces the creative contradictions in his life from colonial St Lucia, where he was part of a tiny English-speaking Protestant mulatto elite in an overwhelmingly French-creole Roman Catholic black society, to 1999 when, a star of international literature and a symbol of cultural decolonization, he wanted to be Poet Laureate of England. The author has had access to
letters, diaries, uncollected and unpublished writings, and conducted numerous interviews in the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Walcott is seen as someone driven by the need to justify his life and
fulfil his talents before an unknowable God, but who, in mastering the ways of the world often regards himself as an example of fallen humanity. Besides offering an approach to Walcott as a poet, dramatist, theatre director, arts critic, and teacher, the book shows how his desire to be a painter influenced his vision and the way he works.
Table of Contents:
I. St Lucia: Formation and Early Writings
1: 1930: The Walcotts of St Lucia
2: 1938-43: Making an Artist, Harold Simmons, Dunstan St Omer
3: 1944-47: From Pantheist to Modernist, James Rodway
4: 1948-49: 25 Poems, Epitaph for the Young, Frank Collymore
5: 1950: The St Lucia Arts Guild, Henri Christophe
II. Jamaica, Grenada, Greenwich Village: First Exile
6: 1950-54: University College of the West Indies, Poems, The Sea at Dauphin
7: 1954-57: First Marriage, Ti-Jean and his Brothers, J. P. Harrison
8: 1958: The West Indian Festival of the Arts, Drums and Colours
9: 1958-59: A Village Life, John Robertson, Malcochon
III. Trinidad: Second Marriage, Second Home, Professional Writer
10: 1959-62: Little Carib Workshop, Alan Ross, Jonathan Cape, In a Green Night
11: 1962-64: Robert Lowell, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Gerald Freund, Selected Poems
12: 1965-66: The Castaway, Trinidad Theatre Workshop
13: 1967-68: Rockefeller Grant, First Tours
14: 1969-70: The Gulf, Dream, at Waterford and Los Angeles, Gordon Davidson.
IV. Trinidad: Black Power, Preparing for Exile. Musicals
15: 1971: Dream on Monkey Mountain, in New York, The New Yorker
16: 1972: Ti-Jean in New York, Joseph Papp, Pat Strachan
17: 1973: Another Life
18: 1974: Joker of Seville, Galt MacDermot
19: 1975-76: O Babylon!, Sea-Grapes, Resignation
V. Tobago, St Croix, New York: Starting Again
20: 1977-78: Remembrance, Pantomime, Joseph Brodsky
21: 1979: The Star-Apple Kingdom, Seamus Heaney
22: 1980-81: New York, MacArthur Award
VI. Boston: Third Marriage, Making It
23: 1981-83: The Fortunate Traveller, The Last Carnival
24: 1984-86: Midsummer, Collected Poems
VII. Boston: North American?, Sigrid
25: 1986-87: The Arkansas Testament
26: 1988-89: International Man of Letters
27: 1987-89: Teacher
28: 1990-91: Omeros
29: 1991-92: The Odyssey, The Nobel Prize
VIII. St Lucia, New York, London: Laureate
30: 1993: Celebrations
31: 1994-96: More Journeys and Homecomings
32: 1996-97: The Bounty
33: 1997-99: The Capeman, Essays, Crowned Again?
Notes
Acknowledgements
Sources
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Bruce King is a freelance editor and writer. He has held professorships or distinguished visiting professorships at Ahmadu Bello (Nigeria), Lagos, Stirling, Windsor (Canada), Canterbury (NZ), Ben Gurion (Israel), Angers (France) Paris III, Paris VII, and North Alabama.
Review :
`King is good on the wider history, the mid-century social landscape, for example'
Paula Burnett, Times Higher Education Supplement
`there is enough fresh material to make those familiar with what has been in the public realm read on, while for new students of Walcott, this biography, however, plainly narrated and data-crammed at times, will become an indispensable accompaniment to his work, a must for the academic library'
Paula Burnett, Times Higher Education Supplement
`A major tribute fo the Odysseus of Caribbean poetry.'
British Bulletin of Publications, No.104 (2001)
`King surprises with much interesting personal insight, detailing a man who struggled to combine lives as journalist, playwright and ambassador for Caribbean poetry, succumbing to many of the perils inherent in the role of artistic genius.'
British Bulletin of Publications, No.104 (2001)
`whole unfamiliar worlds and periods are being recreated for the reader ... the book is no simple eulogy or apologia ... The paragraphys where King summarizes and comments are excellent - they are low-key and unrhetorical but bear the weight of profound knowldege and thought about the subject matter.'
Planet The Welsh Internationalist, June/July 2001
`King is good on Walcott's career; how he earned his living; the milieu in which he operated at every stage of his life. ...King is eloquent on Walcott's faults. He obviously holds him in the highest respect and there is no meanness in his verdict: ...King's book ... does shed light on a complex man.'
Peter Forbes, Another Life, Caribbean Section
`King ... leaves us in no doubt about the daunting graft that goes into sustaining a modern international literary life'
Plays International
`his expertise is strengthened by a personal acquaintance wit his subject, and by having access to a hitherto unpublished prose autobiography. There is an intimacy in the approach which makes some parts read like a memoir of a personal friend ... This is a good book about a great life.'
Sean Lysaght, Irish Times, 30/12/00.
`we must be immensely grateful for Bruce King's biography, for its patient and meticulous recording of archival material, sources of written data and oral testimonies from Walcott's family, friends and fellow-shipmates in the craft.'
David Dabydeen, The Independent, 18/11/00.
`King ... is firm in his belief that art survives its maker, and speculation on the maker's character often prejudices appreciation of the art. So we are left with the writings, and King's erudite interpretation of its backgrounds. Given King's scholarship ... he is idealy placed to examine the astonishing range of literatures which have influenced Walcott's work.'
David Dabydeen, The Independent, 18/11/00.
`King's presentation exceeds traditional expectations of biography and the exploration of one artist's oeuvre ... Thanks to King, we here have ample evidence that Derek Walcott is a world.'
Jill B. Gidmark, The Caribbean Writer
`Extensively researched... King's discoveries will certainly be indispensible for any future biographer. King is... illuminating in his focus on Walcott's 'Caribbean Life'.'
Adam Kirsch, TLS September 15 2000
`... conscientiously researched biography'
Vernon Scannell, Sunday Telegraph
