Victor Stafford Reid was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1 May 1913 and called himself a "citybred person." The son of Alexander Reid (in the shipping business) and Margaret Reid, he traveled a good deal in young adulthood and sought his livelihood in advertising, journalism, farming, and the book trade before he came into the limelight as a fiction writer. With prosperity he lived in a handsome apartment in upper Kingston with his wife, Monica (whom he married in 1935), and their four children. But Reid identified himself with the "country parts" of his homeland, where he set most of his fiction and to which he returned frequently, for reinvigoration and inspiration. He especially loved the mountains.

Reid made Jamaica--its history, people, needs, hopes, and powers--the focus of his work. Though he did receive the Silver and Gold Musgrave Medals (1955, 1978) from the Institute of Jamaica, and then the Order of Jamaica...