"Everyone thought I had a way with words, but it came out as a sharp tongue. No one expected anything from me at all. Had I just sunk in the cracks it would not have been noted. I would have been lucky to be a secretary somewhere," Jamaica Kincaid told Leslie Garis in the New York Times Magazine. Garis continued Kincaid's story: "In 1966, at the age of 17, with no money, no connections and no practical training, Elaine Potter Richardson left the West Indian island of Antigua, bound for New York and a job as an au pair. She did not return until she was 36. By then she was Jamaica Kincaid, a respected author of fiction and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine whose prose is studied in universities and widely anthologized."

A Young Girl in Antigua

Kincaid was born and raised in Antigua, a West Indian...