Derek Alton Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and professor. The collection holds correspondence between Walcott and his American publisher, Robert Giroux.
Derek Alton Walcott (1930-2017) was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and professor. Walcott's poetry grappled with the complexities of Caribbean identity and postcolonialism, and famously incorporated English literary techniques and Afro-Caribbean tradition. Although he was originally a painter, his mother encouraged him to also study poetry and he began to write about Caribbean natural landscapes. Walcott published his first poem, "1944", in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old and self-published his first two collections at nineteen years old.
After graduating from the University College of the West Indies (University of the West Indies) in 1953, Walcott spent some time as a teacher and journalist in both Saint Lucia and Grenada before moving to Trinidad. He earned various scholarships and awards for his writing, including the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study theater in New York City. He later founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop in 1959 with Roderick Walcott, his twin brother.
As the founding director, Walcott wrote numerous plays for the internationally acclaimed Trinidad Theater Workshop, earned an Obie Award for Distinguished Foreign Play for Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), and established himself as a notable playwright. In 1981, Walcott became a professor of poetry and playwright at Boston University, where he also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship that same year.
By the end of his life, Walcott had published twenty-seven poetry collections, taught at several universities, and won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, amongst other prestigious writing awards. Walcott passed away on March 17, 2017 in his home in Saint Lucia.
The Derek Walcott letters feature professional correspondence dating from 1967 to 1968, arranged chronologically. This collection touches on Walcott's creative process in the early stages of writing Another Life (1973), his autobiographical poem of over one hundred pages. In these typed letters, he shares drafts and reflections with his American publisher, Robert Giroux. The letters also contain brief postscripts at the end of each document.
Purchased from Peter Harrington Rare Books in 2024.
Processed by Denise Mantey in 2024.