Eric Walrond was an acclaimed journalist and writer from the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Georgetown, British Guyana in 1898, and lived in Barbados and Panama before immigrating to New York in 1918, when he was 19 years old. In New York, he quickly became an important part of the literary movement of the time, writing for Negro World and Opportunity Magazine. He was a contemporary of Toomer and Hurston, won the Guggenheim Fellowship two times, and traveled extensively. He published Tropic Death in 1926, and it quickly became a best-selling book. Despite his early celebrity, however, he never published another novel. He died in London in 1966 with minimal recognition given to his passing.