Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist from the West Indies, Derek Alton Walcott (born 1930) used a synthesis of Caribbean dialects and English to explore the richness and conflicts of the complex cultural heritage of his homeland.

Derek Alton Walcott was born in Casties, St. Lucia, West Indies, on January 23, 1930. The son of a civil servant and a teacher, he was of mixed African, Dutch, and English heritage. He received a B.A. from St. Mary's College, St. Lucia, in 1953 and attended the University of the West Indies at Kingston, Jamaica. A Rockefeller fellowship brought him to the United States in 1957; he studied under the American stage director Jose Quintero, returned to the islands in 1959 to found the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He taught in St. Lucia, Grenada, and Jamaica and at many American universities: Boston, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, and Yale.

Walcott was married to dancer Norline Metivier and had...