Although Denis Williams is best known as a painter, archaeologist, and social anthropologist, his first novel, Other Leopards (1963), made a major contribution to the Caribbean literature of the 1960s. In the years of widening political independence for the region, West Indian writers were seeking an identity, trapped, as many saw it, between the intellectual hegemony of Europe and the ancestral culture of Africa. Williams, writing out of his own experience, created in his protagonist Froad an archetype of this dilemma. Yet, at the same time, Williams's highly individual imagination created a work that undermined the very stereotype it invoked and that remains as immediate today as when it was first written.

Denis Joseph Ivan Williams was born in Georgetown, Guyana, to Joseph (a merchant) and Isobel Adonis Williams, on 1 February 1923 and studied there until he got his Cambridge Senior School Certificate. In 1946 he went to London and attended...