Born in Panama of Jamaican parents, he went to school in Kingston before going to Oxford, N.C., where he lived until he was drafted into the Army in 1943. A master sergeant at war’s end, Anderson took the G.I. bill through North Carolina College (‘47), went on to study at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, concentrating on 18th century German metaphysics.
Then he set out to travel and write. Perhaps it is this kind of distance that removes “Lover Man” from the mountain of angry- Negro stories. Anderson is not mad at anyone. He was fascinated by the South, by what he had seen, and by what he had heard, and he managed to re-create that fascination for his reader.
