Their mother was a school-teacher and encouraged their early education and love for reading; she was also involved in a community cultural group and got her sons involved in local theater. Roderick, along with his brother, was to become a well-known playwright. Derek Walcott published his first poem at fourteen and his first book at eighteen (
25 Poems, 1948); his first play,
Henri Christophe, was staged in 1950. He earned his B.A. in 1953 in English, French, and Latin, while on a British government scholarship at the University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and he then studied for one more year in the Department of Education. In 1954 he married Fay Moyston, and they later had a son, Peter, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1959. From 1954 until 1957 Walcott taught in various West Indian schools; he soon began to devote more and more time to writing and the theater. On a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1958 he studied theater in New York City. In 1959 he moved to Trinidad and founded the Little Carib Theatre Workshop, which he ran until 1976.
Ambition and talent showed early in Walcott's career. In 1948, with two hundred dollars borrowed from his mother, he had published and then sold on street corners his 25 Poems.
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