Roger Mais OJ was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright.
23 Facts About Roger Mais
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Roger Mais was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica.
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Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, where he was educated at Calabar High School.
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Roger Mais worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party.
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Roger Mais appealed to his local audience on grounds to push for a national identity and agitate against colonialism.
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On 11 July 1944, Roger Mais published an article titled "Now We Know," a denunciation of the British Empire, in Public Opinion, in which he claimed that it was now clear that the Second World War was not a fight for freedom but a war to preserve imperial privilege and exploitation:.
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Roger Mais lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France.
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Roger Mais took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris.
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Roger Mais's artwork appeared on the covers of his novels.
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In 1955 Roger Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50.
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Roger Mais' novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history.
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Roger Mais had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne.
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Many of Roger Mais' manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica and there is an online collection.
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Roger Mais claimed that he was "concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people".
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Roger Mais wanted the novel to be "essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw".
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Roger Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the urban poor.
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Roger Mais looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogany.
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Roger Mais contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica.
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Roger Mais's stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications.
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Roger Mais published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man.
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Subsequently, Roger Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence.
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Roger Mais would include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history.
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However, Roger Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction.