Eric Walrond
Eric Walrond was a notable writer and journalist born on December 18, 1898, in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). His early life was marked by significant challenges, including the departure of his father and subsequent experiences of racial discrimination in Panama, which deeply influenced his literary voice. Walrond began his career in journalism in 1916 and eventually made his way to the United States, where he faced both racial prejudice and the complexities of identity as a West Indian immigrant.
He became associated with influential figures such as Marcus Garvey and contributed to several prominent publications, including The Negro World and Opportunity, the latter being a catalyst for the Harlem Renaissance. His most acclaimed work, *Tropic Death* (1926), is a collection of short stories that reflects on Caribbean identity and the harsh realities of life, employing a poetic style despite its serious themes. Throughout his career, Walrond advocated for literary aesthetics over mere political messaging, which led to tensions with some contemporaries.
After moving to Europe in the late 1920s, he continued to write but did not achieve the same level of recognition as during his earlier years in the U.S. Walrond's work remains significant in Caribbean and African American literature, and he is remembered for his contributions to literary movements that sought to redefine cultural identities. He passed away in England on August 8, 1966, leaving behind a lasting legacy in the literary world.
Subject Terms
Eric Walrond
Writer and journalist associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
- Born: December 18, 1898
- Birthplace: Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana)
- Died: August 8, 1966
- Place of death: London, England
Early Life
Eric Derwent Walrond was born on December 18, 1898, in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). His father was from British Guinea, his mother from Barbados; Walrond’s father left early in the boy’s life to work in Panama, and the family moved to Barbados in 1906 to stay with his mother’s relatives. Walrond attended St. Stephen’s Boys’ School until 1911, when his destitute family sold their possessions and moved to Colón, Panama.
In Colón, Walrond faced harsh discrimination and prejudice from Spanish-speaking whites. This racism—the likes of which Walrond had not previously experienced—had a profound impact on him and was reflected in much of his later writings about the area. In the course of his education, he learned to speak Spanish fluently.
Life’s Work
In 1916, Walrond found work as a reporter at the Spanish-language newspaper The Panama Star and Herald. An American colleague described the United States to him, and Walrond was sufficiently intrigued by the country to leave Colón in 1918. When he arrived in the United States, he was shocked at the treatment he received from New Yorkers, both white and black. Walrond encountered American whites whose racism was more vitriolic than that of Panamanian whites; he also met southern African Americans who disliked West Indian immigrants such as himself.
After being forced to work menial jobs to support himself, Walrond was able to leverage his journalism experience to secure a job at The Weekly Review, a magazine published by civil rights campaigner and fellow West Indian immigrant Marcus Garvey. Walrond caught Garvey’s eye after winning a writing contest held by Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association with a short story that lavished praise on Garvey himself. It was published in Garvey’s magazine The Negro World, on which Walrond became an associate editor.
Despite his initial high opinion of Garvey, by 1923 Walrond had grown disillusioned with The Negro World. Chief among his disagreements with editorial policy was his insistence that aesthetic quality was more essential to literary art than political propaganda. During this period, Walrond also published a series of essays titled "On Being Black" in The New Republic; they described the racist attitudes Walrond had witnessed in the Caribbean and New York. In a radical 1923 essay for Current History, "The New Negro Faces America," Walrond criticized such eminent African American leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, calling for a "New Negro" who behaves differently from white Americans, and has no desire to return to Africa. In addition to dismissing a major tenet of Garvey’s politics—emigration to Africa—Walrond criticized Garvey directly; he was dropped from the staff of The Negro World soon after its publication.
Walrond began writing fiction for the magazine Opportunity, a left-leaning publication run by Charles Spurgeon Johnson’s National Urban League. Opportunity is considered one of the original inspirations for the Harlem Renaissance, and Walrond made significant contributions while politically aligning himself with the New Negro movement. In keeping with his literary philosophy, Walrond’s stories aimed for poetic effect rather than racial uplift. From 1925 to 1927, he worked as Opportunity’s business manager and was instrumental in encouraging the magazine to feature more young African American writers.
In 1926, Walrond published his masterpiece, a collection of short stories about the Caribbean titled Tropic Death. One of the most acclaimed works in all of Caribbean literature, it examines the region’s mix of European and African identities in a harsh, unromantic light. The book is often praised for Walrond’s pervasive use of dialect, which lends the stories verisimilitude. Despite Tropic Death’s depiction of violence, racism, and despair, it is written in a poetic style that upholds classic aesthetic standards.
Walrond published another acclaimed short story, "City Love," in 1927. He left the United States the next year to visit Panama and begin a follow-up to Tropic Death. However, he never finished the planned novel. Walrond moved to Paris in 1929. While he went on to produce short fiction and journalistic articles for Garvey’s later periodical The Black Man, none of his output received the acclaim of his Harlem writings. He moved to England in 1932 and remained there for the rest of his life.
Walrond suffered from health problems throughout his adult life. He died of a massive coronary—his fifth heart attack—on August 8, 1966.
Significance
Walrond had a major influence on the nascent Harlem Renaissance and won major accolades for his writing: a Zona Gale scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, a Harmon Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which financed his trip to Panama. Although he is chiefly remembered for Tropic Death, many academics consider his work essential to the canon of Caribbean and African American literature.
Author Works
Edited text(s):
Black and Unknown Bards: A Collection of Negro Poetry, 1958
Short Fiction:
Tropic Death, 1926
Bibliography
Nazaryan, Alexander. "Lost in the Tropics: The Forgotten Writings of Eric Walrond." NY Daily News, 1 Mar. 2013, www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/lost-tropics-forgotten-writings-eric-walrond-blog-entry-1.1640010. Accessed 29 June 2017. This piece examines the life and legacy of Walrond on the occasion of the republication of Tropic Death, including his nearly forgotten status despite being critically acclaimed.
Niblett, Michael. "The Arc of the ’Other America’: Landscape, Nature, and Region in Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death." In Perspectives on the "Other America": Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, edited by Michael Niblett and Kerstin Oloff. New York: Rodopi, 2009. Examines Walrond’s depiction of the Caribbean’s assortment of races, nationalities, religions, and cultures, and how he experienced them during his travels throughout the region.
Owens, Imani D. "'Hard Reading': US Empire and Black Modernist Aesthetics in Eric Walrond's Tropic Death." MELUS, vol.41, no. 4, 2016, pp. 96–115. Oxford Academic, doi:10.1093/melus/mlw051. Accessed 29 June 2017. Analyzes Tropic Death through the lens of imperialism and modernism.
Pederson, Carl. "The Caribbean Voices of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond." In The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by George Hutchinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Useful essay describing the influence of Caribbean immigrants—in particular McKay and Walrond—on African American art and culture during the Harlem Renaissance.
Walrond, Eric. Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader. Edited by Louis Parascandola. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. The introduction to this volume of Walrond’s fiction provides a thorough biographical sketch.