An Intellectual Biography Of George Lamming

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Intellectual Biography: George Lamming.

George Lamming, born in Carrington Village, Barbados, was of mixed English and Black African heritage, and grew up in his native township of Carrington Village and also in St David's Village, which was the workplace of his adopted father. Unlike many his age, Lamming had the opportunity of an education and with encouragement and particular influence from a teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming became entangled into the world of literature, and the experiences books had to offer. Before long he began his own early writings before moving, and working from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at ‘El Colegio de Venezuela’, which was a private boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Lamming was then to once more move, this time across the ocean to England where Lamming worked briefly in a factory of London whilst working independently as a freelance writer, having already published some of his works in the Barbadian magazine ‘Bim’.

Lammings’ time spent in England was of great benefit in terms of his writing aspirations and Lamming had the opportunity to meet fellow Commonwealth citizens, Africans and Asians, and become aware of the problems and issues of ‘identity’ for the African Diaspora’s. George Lamming is one of the pre-eminent writers and novelists of the early generation West Indian writers, and it can be argued that his first piece of work, the novel ‘In the Castle of My Skin’, is the most widely read ‘Black’ novel to date. It was also this novel, wrote in 1953 that many believe to be the catalyst that allowed Lamming his rise to prominence. It was described as an ‘autobiographical novel of childhood and adolescence written against the anonymity and alienation from self and community that the author experienced in London at the age of twenty-three’. Lammings’ works were largely an expression of awareness and enlightenment of sorts, and he used them directly i...