Eric D. Walrond

Who was Eric D. Walrond?

Eric Derwent Walrond was an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist, who made a lasting contribution to literature; his work remains in print today as a classic of its era. He was well-travelled, being born in Georgetown, Guyana, the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York, and eventually England.

Walrond's most famous book was Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28. In it are collected ten stories, at least one of which had been previously published in small magazines. He had published other short stories prior to this, as well as a number of essays. The scholar Kenneth Ramchand described Walrond's book as a "blistering" work of the imagination; others described his work as "impressionistic" and "frequently telegraphic", reflecting his use of short sentences. The following extract from his short story "Subjection" illustrates his more lyrical narrative style:

Much of the dialogue between Walrond's characters is written in dialect, using the many different tongues loosely centered on the English language to portray the diversity of characters associated with the pan-Caribbean diaspora.