Frank Hercules is a scholar and writer. He has served as a member of the final review panel of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a visiting scholar or writer-in-residence at Loyola and Xavier universities in New Orleans, Louisiana, in addition to being awarded, in 1977, a Rockefeller Fellowship for "distinguished scholarship in the humanities." Frank Hercules will be most remembered, however, for his finely crafted and incisive treatment of West Indian and Afro-American themes and concerns in his writings.

Hercules was born and lived until early adulthood in colonial Port of Spain and San Fernando, Trinidad, during the reign of King George V. His parents were Felix Eugene Michael and Millicent Hercules. Hercules describes his father as an "Afro-West Indian conservative goaded into a crusade, contradictory of his natural temper, by a social philosophy at fundamental odds with the inherent nature of colonialism." He recalls, further, that...