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Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university, yet I don\u2019t recall his name coming up in my studies. In fact, I came across him quite by chance thanks to a reference to his eerie ghost story, My Bones and My Flute<\/em>, in Adam Curtis\u2019s recent documentary Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head<\/em>. As an avid reader of ghost stories, I was intrigued by this Caribbean writer as most of the canon has been written by European and Anglo-American authors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Race had a hugely formative influence on Mittelholzer\u2019s life. Born in 1909 in what was then British Guiana, his father was of Swiss-German origin while his mother was from a light-skinned \u201cmulti-racial\u201d family in Martinique. In a race-obsessed colonial context, the Mittelholzers had firmly established themselves as a \u201cwhite\u201d family, but their son \u2013 while still \u201clight-skinned\u201d \u2013 was the darkest, with features revealing him to be unmistakably of African descent. His presence was a source of deep shame for the family \u2013 a \u201cmomentous disappointment\u201d for his father, in particular. \u201cI was the Dark One at whom he was always frowning and barking,\u201d wrote Mittelholzer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The pressures of repressive colonial society affected Mittelholzer profoundly. To the further disappointment of his father, the young boy retreated into reading and writing, becoming fixated on finding a London publisher for his work. Caribbean writing was dismissed at the time as a contradiction in the colonial metropolis, and Mittelholzer was subject to rejection after rejection, which likely compounded the rejection he experienced within his own family. He persisted. In 1938, he wrote Corentyne Thunder<\/em> and at the end of that year received the positive response he had sought for so long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n