Herbert George de Lisser was active as a journalist, editor, novelist, and man of letters during the first half of the twentieth century. For much of this period, de Lisser also gave unstinting service to public institutions, and, together with his literary achievements, this made him a distinguished figure in Jamaican intellectual, artistic, political, and social circles. Although his distinction has faded as a result of sociopolitical changes that have inevitably overtaken Jamaica, de Lisser still retains a notable position in literary history as the first important novelist of the English-speaking Caribbean.

De Lisser was born in Falmouth, Jamaica, on 9 December 1878, at a time when the island was still a British colony and when slavery had been abolished for almost fifty years, but manners were still largely determined by factors of race, color, and class--a system that had flourished in the rigidly feudalistic structure of slave society. De...