British · 1900–1976
Richard Hughes achieved fame with A High Wind in Jamaica, a novel that disturbed comfortable assumptions about childhood innocence. His child protagonists, captured by pirates, adapt with unsettling ease to violence and moral confusion. Hughes wrote slowly and published sparingly. In Hazard depicted a cargo ship surviving a hurricane with technical precision and psychological insight. His incomplete Human Predicament trilogy attempted to chronicle European history from the 1920s through World War II. Hughes brought modernist technique to adventure narrative, finding in extreme situations the revelations of character that domesticity conceals.