Brief Biography of Roger Mais

Roger Mais was born on 11 August 1905 in Kingston, Jamaican middle-class family and came to maturity in the 1930s. Mais had not only the artistic gift but made the decision to develop that gift into a life of letters was, at the time he began writing, still unusual for a West Indian, let alone a brown, middle-class man. It involved him in learning about the black underclass with the kind of innocent but informed creative attention that made it possible to report back accurately in the three novels that were published toward the sudden end of his short life (he died of cancer at age forty-nine). It also involved him in the kind of political commitment and cultural reorientation that not only inform the novels but caused him literally to change sides during the workers' antihardship and anticolonial uprisings of 1938, when, in the middle of his going to enlist as an antiriot special constable, he joined the freedom fighters instead. During this short period of his life he wrote many a master piece of literary work incliding the very provocotive 'BROTHERMAN'.