Walrond, Eric (1898-1966), was an African American and Afro-Caribbean writer who played an important role in the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that promoted greater freedom of expression in African American literature and other arts during the 1920’s and early 1930’s. It was set in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
Walrond is best known for his collection of 10 short stories published as Tropic Death (1926). The stories are set in British Guiana (now Guyana), Barbados, and the Panama Canal Zone. The stories typically are unsentimental and grim, often dealing with forced migration, colonialism, racism, class intolerance, and other forms of injustice. Walrond wrote the stories in a dense mixture of regional dialects. Dialects are local forms of speech. Tropic Death was the only book Walrond published during his lifetime. Much of his later writing was devoted to journalism.
Eric Derwent Walrond was born on Dec. 18, 1898, in Georgetown, British Guiana. He moved with his family to Barbados in 1906. The family then moved to Panama in 1911, where Walrond’s father found work during the building of the Panama Canal.
Walrond began his writing career as a reporter for the Panama Star and Herald from 1916 to 1918. He moved to New York City at the age of 20 to attend Columbia University. During his nearly 10-year stay in New York City, he wrote short stories about such themes as white racism and conflicts between African American migrants from the South and the Black Caribbean community. He also recorded his impressions of Harlem as well as political essays and reviews of other Black authors of the day. These writings were originally published in periodicals. A selection was issued in book form in 1998, after his death, in Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader.
In 1928, Walrond left Harlem. After traveling in the Caribbean and living in France for several years, he settled in London, where he worked as an editor and an accountant. He won a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1928-1929 to support his literary career, but his early promise was not realized. Walrond died in London on Aug. 8, 1966.
