Roger Mais (1904-1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. This article does not cite its references or sources. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ... Poet is a term applied to a person who composes poetry, including extended forms such as dramatic verse. ... A playwright is someone who writes for the theatre. ...

Mais was perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the nationalist movement which began with the labour rebellion of 1938. His play of that year, George William Gordon, which focused on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, and who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a National Hero. Nationalism is an ideology that creates and sustains a nation as a concept of a common identity for groups of humans. ... 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... On October 11, 1865, Paul Bogle led 200 to 300 black men and women into the town of Morant Bay, parish of St. ... 1865 is a common year starting on Sunday. ...

Mais became a writer for the weekly newspaper, Public Opinion, which was associated with the People's National Party. A column he wrote for the newspaper, entitled "Now We Know", critical of British colonial policy resulted in his imprisonment for sedition. For other uses, see Peoples National Party (disambiguation). ... Sedition refers to a legal designation of non-overt conduct that is deemed by a legal authority as being acts of treason, and hence deserving of legal punishment. ...

This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together, a work focused on working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. Mais's second novel, Brother Man, was a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Haile Selassie I Rasta, or the Rastafari movement, is a religious movement that accepts Haile Selassie I, the former emperor of Ethiopia, as King of Kings, Lord of Lords and the Lion of Judah as Jah (the Rastafari name for God, from a shortened form of Jehovah found in Psalm...

While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, his third novel, Black Lightning centred on an artist living in the countryside.

Mais was also known as a poet, and showed a fine command of lyricism, and a short-story writer. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death.

Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. John Edgar Colwell Hearne (1926, Montreal, Canada, 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. ...