A Great and Neglected West Indian-American Writer Frank Hercules

Although one may speculate the reasons, it can hardly be doubted that the established post-WWII West Indian writers in the United States have received less than their fair share of critical attention from intellectuals in the Caribbean.1 The neglect is of long standing. Neither critical nor even bibliographic treatments of Caribbean literature dealing with the earliest stages of the Caribbean novel commonly notice the Trinidad novePs admittedly undistinguished beginnings in Trinidadian-American Archer Tracy, the most authoritative work on the West Indian novel, Kenneth Ramchand's The West Indian Novel and Its Background, merely quotes a passage by Robert Bone that lists tracy's name,2 and, remarkably, he is not even mentioned in the acknowledgedly historical or bibliographic works by Sander, Herdeck and Bandara.3 As a figure of some pertinent historical interest, and as an illuminating contrast to the special subject of this study, Frank Hercules, Tracy deserves passing notice

American west · Ethnology · Genealogy · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History