Minty Alley

Minty Alley is a novel written by Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James in the late 1920s, and published in London by Secker & Warburg in 1936, as West Indian literature was starting to flourish. It was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in England, and "earned much praise for its sensitive portrayal of the poor, especially poor women, and for its playful use of the folkloric trickster tradition in a modern context." According to Christian Høgsbjerg, James later noted: "'the basic constituent of my political activity and outlook' was already set out in 'the "human" aspect' of Minty Alley, the unpublished novel he wrote in 1928 about the working people of one 'barrack-yard' he stayed in that summer." James arrived in the United Kingdom in 1932, intent on a career as a writer and bearing the manuscript of Minty Alley, and found employment writing about cricket for the Manchester Guardian. He soon became involved in politics, writing books about the Bolshevik Revolution and Haitian Revolution, leaving his literary ambitions behind. Minty Alley was his only novel. James died in London in 1989.