Literature
Jamaican Thomas MacDermot is credited for fostering the creation of Jamaican literature, and his Becka's Buckra Baby (Becka’s Buckra Baby available openly and freely online from the Digital Library of the Caribbean) as the beginning of modern Caribbean literature. Jamaican Claude McKay is credited with inspiring France's Negritude (“Blackness”) movement, as well as being a founding father of the Harlem Renaissance. Having established himself as a poet in Jamaica, he moved to the U.S. in his 20s and proceeded to travel to France, but never returned to his birthplace.
McKay is not the only Jamaican poet, Una Marson was well known for her poetry and her activism as a feminist, and Louise Bennett-Coverly is another Jamaican poet known for her unique voice. Similarly, St. Lucian Nobel prize winner, Derek Walcott, studied at the University in Jamaica. Other writers who have recently gained acclaim in Jamaica are Hazel Dorothy Campbell and the late Mikey Smith.
The island's local dialect has become an important element to their literature and other arts. The speech style is particularly notable in poetry or in prose's dialogue.
Read more about this topic: Jamaican Literature
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“Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)