The full impact of the work of Dennis Scott, its value and influence, and the totality of Scott's contribution to Caribbean literature are still, to some extent, unknown to an international audience. Much of his work is unpublished, in some cases unpublishable, and at this time unrecordable because of the variety of artistic disciplines within which he worked and the sensitive, unassuming nature of the man himself, who effectively and consistently suppressed self-promotion.

Dennis C. Scott was born on 16 December 1939 to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. He was encouraged to read and often spoke of his happy childhood. Though he found the boarding school he attended, Jamaica College, to be cold and impersonal, he nevertheless rose to the position of head boy while there. After graduating, and then studying for a while at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at Mona, he left to teach English...