Aimé Césaire

            This biography of Césaire was based on four sources: the corpus of 1,025 texts that Kora Véron and Thomas Hale collected for Les Ecrits d’Aimé Césaire: biobibliographie commentée 1913-2008 (Champion, 2013); the 556 historical and biographical notes in that work; scores of interviews with Césaire and his contemporaries; and a trove of unpublished documents from archives, libraries, schools, publishers, political parties, and government agencies.  These sources constitute the largest body of material on Cesaire in the world.  The 1,600 footnotes offer readers keys to much of that corpus.  With it Véron debunks misinformation on Césaire by scholars who have not had access to all these sources, have repeated faulty narratives published earlier, or simply failed to understand the relationship between the literary and the political activities that shaped Césaire’s career. Véron seamlessly blends information from both these strands to weave her detailed portrait of Césaire’s life.