edgar mittelholzer
Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) is often considered to be the first novelist from the West Indies to earn an international reputation for his fiction, as well as the first professional novelist to emerge from the English-speaking Caribbean. Beginning with his first book, Creole Chips, which he self-published in 1937, Mittelholzer would go on to publish more than twenty volumes of fiction, as well as two volumes of nonfiction, including the autobiography A Swarthy Boy (1963). His best-known works include A Morning at the Office (1950), which one critic cited as having begun ‘the great decade of the West Indian novel’, the Kaywana trilogy (1952-58), and the ghost story My Bones and My Flute (1955).