Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke is among the most prominent writers in Canada today. His Toronto trilogy ( The Meeting Point, 1967; Storm of Fortune, 1973; and The Bigger Light, 1975) and many of his short stories examine more fully and more intimately than any other works have to date the racial, cultural, social, and emotional problems experienced by black West Indian immigrants to a large Canadian city, problems which Clarke knows by firsthand experience.

Clarke, the son of artist Kenneth Trothan and Gladys Clarke, a sixteen-year-old hotel maid, was born on the West Indian island of Barbados, where he received his schooling. He went first to St. Matthias Boys School, a primary school where the majority of the pupils were black. Vivid, lively accounts of these early school days are found in his memoir, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack (1980). From St. Matthias he won a scholarship to Combermere School, one...