Search results for ""Author Edgar Mittelholzer""

This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer’s uncollected by Juanita Cox, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, two short plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs. This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering.

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When Sylvia Ann Russell's louche and philandering English father is murdered in scandalous circumstances, she soon discovers that for a young woman with a black mother, 1930's Georgetown is a place of hazard. This is a world where men seek either respectable wives from 'good' families, or vulnerable young women to exploit. Here the fall from respectability to prostitution at the Viceroy Hotel can be all too rapid. The Life and Death of Sylvia is a pioneering and affecting novel of social protest over the fate of women in a misogynist world – and a richly imagined study of character, that inhabits Sylvia's psyche with great inwardness. But Mittelholzer's ambition extends beyond character and protest. His goal is to present Sylvia's individual fate as cosmically meaningful, both when she redeems herself by reclaiming her own story through writing, and by making her story part of the larger patterns of sex and death, creativity and decay, sound and silence that he composes in this onwards surging 'Georgetown symphony' of life.Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

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Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination up river in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realize that there is more to Henry Nevinson s invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a rich businessman. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay. Told in Woodsley s skeptical, self-mocking and good-humored voice, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home."

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Edgar Mittelholzer’s autobiography, first published in 1963, which covers the first eighteen years of his life, was his first return in writing to about his native Guyana, of memory and imagination, for a good many years. Born into a household that regarded itself as European, in Guyana’s second town of New Amsterdam on the edge of orentyne, Mittelholzer writes with vivid feeling about what it was like to be a boy whose “swarthiness” was anathema to his bigoted father. But what most distinguishes his account of this painful experience is his empathetic attempt to understand the tensions that drove his father’s attitudes. In the process, Mittelholzer gives an account of his family that is frank and searching and an account of the role of race, class and gender in small-town colonial life that is unrivalled in its perception. He writes memorably, for instance, of the ambivalence expressed by family members towards their neighbouring and very successful Indo-Guyanese family, the Luckhoos, and the tortured sensibility of the “coloured” middle class strung out between Black and White. A Swarthy Boy is also an attempt to trace the origins of the man Mittelholzer thought he had become, the division he felt within himself between the sensitive soul and the militant fighter, the Idyll and the Warrior – a division that he portrays in a good many of his most intimately observed characters. Despite being written only a couple of years before his fiery suicide, A Swarthy Boy was written with zest, not a little humour and some affection for the world he left to become a professional writer in Britain. This new edition has an introduction by Juanita Cox and an afterword by Jacqueline Ward, Edgar Mittelholzer’s second wife, who was with him at the time of writing A Swarthy Boy.

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Ramgolall, an old Indian cow-minder, has punished himself to save money and has built a sizeable herd. His first daughter is the long-established mistress of a well-to-do white planter. Their son, his grandson, Geoffry, light-skinned and ambitious, seems destined for success. But when Geoffry becomes involved with Kattree, his daughter by a second marriage, Ramgolall's world begins to fall apart.This classic work of West Indian fiction, first published in 1941, is much more than a pioneering and acute portrayal of the rural Indo-Guyanese world; it is a work of literary ambition that creates a symphonic relationship beween its characters and the vast openness of the Corentyne coast.This beautiful new edition features an introduction by Mittelholzer scholar Juanita Cox.

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When Gregory Hawke, a burnt-out case from the Spanish civil war, seeks refuge at the remote utopian commune his uncle, the Reverend Harmston, has set up among the local Amerindians one hundred miles up the Berbice River, he finds a society devoted to 'Hard work, frank love and wholesome play'. Apparently free-thinking and ecologically green before its time, Gregory finds much in Berkelhoost to attract him, particularly when his pretty cousin Mabel shows an unmistakeable interest. But there is an authoritarian side to the project that alarms Gregory's democratic instincts and it is this which makes it impossible to read the novel, first published in 1951, without seeing elements of prophecy – of the fate of the People's Temple commune at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978.No such dreadful end awaits the generality of the communards, but in this most inventive of Mittelholzer's novels there are darker notes beneath the generally comic tone. Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

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