Richard Hughes —British Novelist
Author of A High Wind in Jamaica
In late August 1929, five months after the US publication of his novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (US title The Innocent Voyage), the 29-year-old British author Richard Hughes, was crossing the Atlantic on the SS De Grasse in time for the British publication in September.
Sadly, the old German steamer had to take a rather circuitous route — to avoid severe storms — and didn’t dock in Southampton until late September, by which time Hughes’ first novel was already at the top of the British best-seller lists. On disembarkation, Hughes found himself a literary celebrity, with an ever-growing bank balance, and a reputation as something of a controversial figure due, in the words of Hughes’ biographer Richard Perceval Graves, to the novel’s “… sharp, bleak, and decidedly original view of childhood.”
The distinguished literary editor, Desmond MacCarthy devoted the August 1929 edition of his magazine, Life & Letters, to an abridged version of the novel, describing it as a “…work of unusual merit and originality.”
There can be little doubt that A High Wind in Jamaica helped change the notion that literary fiction could also be best-selling fiction, but perhaps, more importantly, it changed how children were portrayed within such fiction; we only have to look at the…
