Jacques Roumain: A Life Of Resistance

by Patti Marxsen, Educa Vision Inc. (Editor)

This first biography in forty years of Haitian public intellectual and writer, Jacques Roumain (1907 1944), explores his brief life within the context of his times the American Occupation of Haiti, the rise of fascism in Europe, racism in the U.S., and Marxism. An articulate witness and activist, Roumain exposed injustice through poetry, essays, novels, and short fiction. His political thought emerges through these works, several of which are included here in English translation. Though best known in the U.S. as author of Masters of the Dew, Roumain was more than a literary writer. This thorough examination of his life, based on extensive archival research, retraces his formative years in Haiti and Europe, his study of ethnology in Paris, and periods of enforced exile in Europe, Harlem, Cuba, and Mexico. His close relationship with his wife Nicole is illuminated through passages of his letters to her, published here in English for the first time. This engagingly written biography presents the first full picture of this remarkable Haitian to Anglophone readers.

322 pages, Perfect Paperback

Published April 4, 2019