Biography Essay

Roger Mais was born on 11 August 1905 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a "brown," respectable, middle- range-landowning, middle-class family and came to maturity in the 1930s, when these inherited categories were coming under pressure due to the sociopolitical changes of the time. That Mais had not only the artistic gift but made the decision to develop that gift into a life of letters was, at the time he began writing, still unusual for a West Indian, let alone a brown, middle-class man. It involved him in learning about the black underclass with the kind of innocent but informed creative attention that made it possible to report back accurately in the three novels that were published toward the sudden end of his short life (he died of cancer at age forty-nine). It also involved him in the kind of political commitment and cultural reorientation that not only inform the...