Readers of Richard Hughes may be surprised to find him categorized as a children's writer. Although he wrote several books of stories for children, his reputation is founded upon four novels for adults. The first and best-known of the four, The Innocent Voyage (1928), better known as A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), was quickly recognized as one of the most startling and impressive, though controversial, studies of childhood ever written. This book alone gives him a place of distinction in the history of children's literature, in the broader sense of that term.

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes was born in Surrey on 19 April l900 to Arthur and Louise Grace Warren Hughes. All the standard reference works give his birthplace as Weybridge, but the biography by Richard Poole, who knew Hughes and his family, names it as Catenham. This discrepancy would not be worthy of notice save that it is symptomatic...