Eric D. Walrond

Eric Walrond was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, to a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. When Eric was aged eight, his father left to find work work in the Panama Canal Zone, and he moved with his mother, Ruth, to live with relatives in Barbados, where he attended St. Stephen's Boys' School. In 1911, he moved to Colon, Panama at the time when the Panama Canal was being constructed. Here Walrond completed his school education and became fluent in Spanish as well as English. Eric Walrond had to go through bad discrimination and racism from white people who spoke Spanish. Eric Walrond was really hurt from what he experienced only because he had not gone through a such thing as that. In this time of him getting his education he had to learn to speak Spanish pretty often. Following training as a secretary and stenographer, he was employed as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal Commission at Cristóbal, and as a reporter for the Panama Star-Herald newspaper. In 1918 he moved to New York, where he attended Columbia University and was taught by Dorothy Scarborough. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Walrond had trouble finding a job in the US and he thinks it was because of racism in the New York newspaper offices. The following extract from his short story "On Being Black" illustrates how he thought it would be different:"I am a stenographer. I am in need of a job. I try the employment agencies. I battle with anaemic youngsters and giggling flappers. I am at the tail end of a long line—only to be told the job is already filled. I am ignorantly optimistic."Eric Walrond compared the racism in the United States of America to the racism in Panama. He found that it was worse in the United States of America because he faced racism from the white people and also African Americans cause he was a West Indian immigrant. ==Harlem Renaissance writer ==

In New York, Walrond worked at first as hospital secretary, porter, and stenographer. Walrond's first writing job in the US was a part time associate with the weekly review. While working at the weekly review Eric Walrond met the publisher Marcus Garvey who was also a West Indian immigrant.He subsequently became a protégé of the National Urban League's director Charles S. Johnson. Between 1925 and 1927 he was a contributor to, and business manager of, the Urban League's Opportunity magazine, which had been founded in 1923 to help bring to prominence African-American contributors to the arts and politics of the 1920s. Early on in his career he was writing about political arena but later on down his career he shifted towards the black culture more.One of Eric Walrond biggest accomplishments was his story Tropic Death that he published in 1926. In the Tropic Death it talked about how different people lived together in the Caribbean and about the violence they faced. Walrond published his first short story called "The Palm Porch", which describes a brothel in the Canal Zone, where a merciless plot to take over the land unfolds. His other short stories included "On Being Black" (1922), "On Being a Domestic" (1923), "Miss Kenny's Marriage" (1923), "The Stone Rebounds" (1923), "Vignettes of the Dusk" (1924), "The Black City" (1924), and "City Love" (1927) – the year that Duke Ellington began his career in New York and the Harlem Globetrotters were founded. In two consecutive years (1928 and 1929), Walrond was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. ==Tropic Death==

Tropic Death is a collection of 10 stories, at least one of which had been previously published in small magazines. He had published other short stories prior to this, as well as a number of essays. The scholar Kenneth Ramchand described Walrond's book as a "blistering" work of the imagination; others described his work as "impressionistic" and "frequently telegraphic", reflecting his use of short sentences. The following extract from his short story "Subjection" illustrates his more lyrical narrative style: : "A ram-shackle body, dark in the ungentle spots exposing it, jogged, reeled and fell at the tip of a white bludgeon. Forced a dent in the crisp caked earth. An isolated ear lay limp and juicy, like some exhausted leaf or flower, half joined to the tree whence it sprang. Only the sticky milk flooding it was crimson, crimsoning the dust and earth." Much of the dialogue between Walrond's characters is written in dialect, using the many different tongues loosely centered on the English language to portray the diversity of characters associated with the pan-Caribbean diaspora. W.E.B. Du Bois thought that the book of Tropic Death had an important message because it talked about how it was being black in another country than the US. The following extract from his book review shows why W.E.B DU Bois agreed with him:"Here is a book of ten stories of death, which, with impressionistic pen and little plot, show forth with singular vividness the life of black laborers of the West Indies. There is superstition, unusual dialect, singular economic glimpse; but above all, there is truth and human sympathy".A lot of people kind of forgot about the book but then came back to realize how important it was because of the things they started to realize. People started to realize the influence that the US was affecting on other countries which made them realize how important his book was even though it wasn't set in the United States how they wanted it to be. == Life after career ==

, London In 1928 Walrond left the United States to visit Panama because he planned to write another novel. He did not finish his novel so moved to Paris in 1929. Walrond continued to write but his pieces were not as popular as his previous writings. In 1932 Walrond moved to England and settled there for the rest of his life. After he left the hospital, he was involved in a theatrical production at London's Royal Court Theatre in the aftermath of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. In the Royal Court Theatre, Walrond produced a literary work in "Masks of Arcady". Robert Bone, scholar of American literature and a professor of English at Columbia University, gives details of this production in his CLA Journal. Eric Walrond suffered from many health problems including heart attacks. On August 8, 1966 Eric Walrond passed away on his fifth heart attack. On 8 August 1966, at the age of 67, Walrond collapsed on a street in central London and was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Following an autopsy, he was buried at Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, on 17 September 1966. His grave lies on a path edge in the southern section. == Legacy ==

Despite only living in the US for ten years, Eric Walrond was significant to the Harlem Renaissance and African American literature. Eric Walrond writing was important because he told the truth on how African Americans faced violence and racism but he wrote this in way that people would still want to read it. While Eric Walrond was working with Marcus Garvey he was able to help Eric Walrond process the racism that he faced. Eric Walrond was able to handle racism in a better manner than usually and also was making more money to live a decent livelihood. Eric Walrond was able to be at his expenses of his strongest needs as a writer because he did not enjoy writing about the things he had to write about despite before. After his death, which occurred while he was living in reduced circumstances, his early literary work has enjoyed wider recognition, as reflected in Winds Can Wake up the Dead... and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, both published in the 1990s, In Search of Asylum, which appeared in 2011, and in James Davis' 2015 biography. At the time, however, his passing appears to have gone relatively unnoticed, although Arna Bontemps wrote of his death, from a fifth heart attack, in a letter to Langston Hughes, dated 1 September 1966. Countee Cullen's well-known poem "Incident" is dedicated to Walrond. Eric Walrond received many awards for his writings including a Zona Gale scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, a Harmon Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. ==Selected bibliography==

Novels • Tropic Death New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. Anthology • Parascandola, Louis J. (ed.), Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: an Eric Walrond Reader, Wayne State University Press, 1998. • Parascandola, Louis J., and Carl A. Wade (eds), In Search of Asylum: the Later Writings of Eric Walrond, University Press of Florida, 2011 ==References==