Alfred H. Mendes

Alfred Hubert Mendes MM was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian novelist and short-story writer. He was a leading member of the 1930s "Beacon group" of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad and Tobago which included Albert Gomes, C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels, Pitch Lake (1934) and Black Fauns (1935), and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was "one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies".