Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life [Hardcover]

Bruce King (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019871131X | ISBN-13: 978-0198711315 | Publication Date: December 21, 2000 | Edition: First Edition

This is the first full-scale literary biography of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. It traces the creative contradictions in his life from colonial St. Lucia, where he was part of a tiny English-speaking Protestant mulatto elite in an overwhelmingly French-Creole Roman Catholic black society, to 1999 when, a star of international literature and a symbol of cultural decolonization, he wanted to be Poet Laureate of England. The author had had access to letters, diaries, uncollected and unpublished writings, and conducted numerous interviews in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Walcott is seen as someone driven by the need to justify his life and fulfill his talents before an unknowable God, but who, in mastering the ways of the world often regards himself as an example of fallen humanity. Besides offering an approach to Walcott as a poet, dramatist, theater director, arts critic, and teacher, the book shows how his desire to be a painter influenced his vision and the way he works.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`King is good on the wider history, the mid-century social landscape, for example' Paula Burnett, Times Higher Education Supplement

`there is enough fresh material to make those familiar with what has been in the public realm read on, while for new students of Walcott, this biography, however, plainly narrated and data-crammed at times, will become an indispensable accompaniment to his work, a must for the academic library' Paula Burnett, Times Higher Education Supplement

`A major tribute fo the Odysseus of Caribbean poetry.' British Bulletin of Publications, No.104 (2001)

`King surprises with much interesting personal insight, detailing a man who struggled to combine lives as journalist, playwright and ambassador for Caribbean poetry, succumbing to many of the perils inherent in the role of artistic genius.' British Bulletin of Publications, No.104 (2001)

`whole unfamiliar worlds and periods are being recreated for the reader ... the book is no simple eulogy or apologia ... The paragraphys where King summarizes and comments are excellent - they are low-key and unrhetorical but bear the weight of profound knowldege and thought about the subject matter.' Planet The Welsh Internationalist, June/July 2001

`King is good on Walcott's career; how he earned his living; the milieu in which he operated at every stage of his life. ...King is eloquent on Walcott's faults. He obviously holds him in the highest respect and there is no meanness in his verdict: ...King's book ... does shed light on a complex man.' Peter Forbes, Another Life, Caribbean Section

`King ... leaves us in no doubt about the daunting graft that goes into sustaining a modern international literary life' Plays International

`his expertise is strengthened by a personal acquaintance wit his subject, and by having access to a hitherto unpublished prose autobiography. There is an intimacy in the approach which makes some parts read like a memoir of a personal friend ... This is a good book about a great life.' Sean Lysaght, Irish Times, 30/12/00.

`we must be immensely grateful for Bruce King's biography, for its patient and meticulous recording of archival material, sources of written data and oral testimonies from Walcott's family, friends and fellow-shipmates in the craft.' David Dabydeen, The Independent, 18/11/00.

`King ... is firm in his belief that art survives its maker, and speculation on the maker's character often prejudices appreciation of the art. So we are left with the writings, and King's erudite interpretation of its backgrounds. Given King's scholarship ... he is idealy placed to examine the astonishing range of literatures which have influenced Walcott's work.' David Dabydeen, The Independent, 18/11/00.

About the Author

Bruce King is a freelance editor and writer and the author of Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama and Modern Indian Poetry.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 760 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (December 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019871131X
• ISBN-13: 978-0198711315
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,508,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the provinces to Stockholm-a professional career, December 25, 2000

By 

Lee, John Robert (Castries, Saint Lucia, West Indies (Eastern Caribbean)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Hardcover)

In this exhaustive and thorough 714page biography, Bruce King sets out the development of Derek Walcott as a poet and dramatist whose ambition and talent led him from the colonial backwaters of the Caribbean of the forties to the Nobel stage in Stockholm in 1992. The reader will not find a gossipy, tell-all chronicle.King follows Walcott from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Saint Lucia through university in Jamaica,life in Trinidad where he formed his Trinidad Theatre Workshop and on to his jet setting years as an international writer whose personal friends were Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Paul Simon et al.Through his close detailing of Walcott's relative poverty, his incessant travelling to read his work, his disappointments, his successes,his sheer prolific output of writing and art, King fulfills his goal to demonstrate the effects on a major literary talent of cultural decolonialisation, the recognition of national literatures, the place of the U.S.in encouraging artists like Walcott.Walcott's is a very modern life,an example of the changing face of the once imperial-international literary and artistic scene.Walcott's work, as seen in his most recentTieopolo's Hound (an integration of poetry and art), continues to defy literature boundaries.King's biography will further understanding of the writer, his work, the culture from which he comes, and the larger movements in 20th century arts and letters.A must for general libraries, literary collections, and for readers and students of modern literature. A recommended companion volume is also King's earlier "Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama"(Oxford,1995).

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the provinces to Stockholm-a professional career, December 25, 2000

By 

Lee, John Robert (Castries, Saint Lucia, West Indies (Eastern Caribbean)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Hardcover)

In this exhaustive and thorough 714page biography, Bruce King sets out the development of Derek Walcott as a poet and dramatist whose ambition and talent led him from the colonial backwaters of the Caribbean of the forties to the Nobel stage in Stockholm in 1992. The reader will not find a gossipy, tell-all chronicle.King follows Walcott from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Saint Lucia through university in Jamaica,life in Trinidad where he formed his Trinidad Theatre Workshop and on to his jet setting years as an international writer whose personal friends were Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Paul Simon et al.Through his close detailing of Walcott's relative poverty, his incessant travelling to read his work, his disappointments, his successes,his sheer prolific output of writing and art, King fulfills his goal to demonstrate the effects on a major literary talent of cultural decolonialisation, the recognition of national literatures, the place of the U.S.in encouraging artists like Walcott.Walcott's is a very modern life,an example of the changing face of the once imperial-international literary and artistic scene.Walcott's work, as seen in his most recentTieopolo's Hound (an integration of poetry and art), continues to defy literature boundaries.King's biography will further understanding of the writer, his work, the culture from which he comes, and the larger movements in 20th century arts and letters.A must for general libraries, literary collections, and for readers and students of modern literature. A recommended companion volume is also King's earlier "Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama"(Oxford,1995).