Hearne, John (Caulwell, Edgar)

February 4, 1926
December 12, 1994

John Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, the son of Maurice Vincent Hearne and Doris Delisser-Hearne. He attended Jamaica College in Kingston, Jamaica, and at the age of seventeen he joined the Royal Air Force as an air gunner, seeing duty between 1943 and 1946. After the war, Hearne studied at Edinburgh University (M.A. in history, 1949), and the University of London (Diploma of Education, 1950). He then joined the growing community of West Indian students in postwar London who would later distinguish themselves in several fields of endeavor. His passion for and skill at writing was soon recognized, and he became one of the young contributors of short stories to Edna Manley's pioneering literary magazine FOCUS, which began publication in Kingston during the 1940s. To support his early writing, Hearne taught in various schools in England and Jamaica (where he taught for several years at Calabar High School). In 1956 Hearne married Leeta Hopkinson.

In 1955 Hearne's first full-length novel, the slightly autobiographical Voices under the Window, was published in London, eliciting favorable reviews from a wide cross-section of the British press. Voices brilliantly illustrates the enduring strengths of Hearne's creative writing—a vivid, elaborate verbal artistry; a tight, economically written plot; strongly drawn characters; highly sophisticated, class-cadenced dialogue; and endless observations on the essentially Caribbean themes of love, violence, politics, social class, color, and race. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1956, awarded for the best novel by a British Commonwealth author under thirty, and the Musgrave Silver Medal, awarded by the Institute of Jamaica, in 1964. His achievements placed him in the forefront of the Caribbean literary boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Voices, set in Jamaica, was quickly succeeded by four additional novels, all closely following the same recipe of Voices : Stranger at the Gate appeared in 1956; The Faces of Love (published in the United States as The Eye of the Storm ) in 1957; The Autumn Equinox in 1959; and Land of the Living in 1961. These second four novels are all set on the fictitious Caribbean island of Cayuga, a thinly disguised, imaginative re-creation of Jamaica.

After 1961, Hearne busied himself teaching, working for the government, writing plays and commentaries for radio and television, and producing a regular newspaper column in one of the leading daily papers of Jamaica. His articles appeared in Public Opinion, News Week, New Statesman, Nation, Pagoda, and Spotlight. Several of his radio plays were aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Between 1962 and 1992 Hearne served as director of the Creative Arts Center at the University of the West Indies, and as chair of the Institute of Jamaica. He also taught for short periods at several universities in Canada and the United States.

In 1969 Hearne collaborated with fellow journalist Morris Cargill to write a novel of international intrigue under the pseudonym John Morris. Set in Jamaica, Fever Grass was the first of three such collaborations. Hearne's final novel, The Sure Salvation, appeared in 1981. This was a historical novel dealing with slavery and the slave trade, and it revealed much of the creative power that exemplified his earlier novels. Hearne retired from the University of the West Indies in 1992, and he died on December 12, 1994.

See also Literature of the English-Speaking Caribbean

Bibliography

Jones, Joseph, and Johanna Jones. Authors and Areas of the West Indies. Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaughn, 1970.

Ramchand, Kenneth. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber and Faber, 1970.

Ramchand, Kenneth. West Indian Narrative: An Introductory Anthology, rev. ed. London: Nelson Caribbean, 1980.

franklin w. knight (2005)