Jacques Roumain, the son of a wealthy Haitian family, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907. After being educated in Europe he identified with the resistance movement against the American occupation. He started Le Revue Indigène and published various books including La Montagne Ensorcelée (1931). He founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, was arrested and, after three years in prison, travelled in Europe and the United States until his return in 1941 when he established the Bureau d'Ethnologie in an effort to legitimise the study of Haiti's peasantry. He was sent in 1943 to the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. It was there that he completed this book Gouverneurs de la Rosée a few months before his sudden death in 1944.
