The British author Richard Hughes (1900-1976) rose to fame in the late 1920s and 1930s upon the publication of his best-selling and critically acclaimed first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica. By the end of his life he had completed four novels--along with a selection of plays, poems, and children's tales--and held a prominent place among his literary contemporaries.

Richard Hughes was born in the the English town of Caterham, Surrey on April 19, 1900. Although he wrote fondly of his childhood in England, Hughes became acquainted with mortality and loss at an early age. His birth preceded the death of a brother, Arthur Warren Collingwood Hughes, by only eight days. His older sister, Grace Margaret Lilias, died in 1902. When the boy was five years old he lost his father, Arthur Hughes, who had worked in the Public Record Office. The elder Hughes had undergone cauterization of his vocal cords...