Arthur Edgar E. Smith

Day of Judgement and Ten Other Stories Arthur Edgar E. Smith 1st edition

This publication is a culmination of my attempt at writing which started in 1966 in emulating Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe whose story I had grown so greatly fascinated with through English lessons I was having from a friend of my late father. It was then that I started nurturing dreams of writing a similar life-like story in the first person narrative voice. I would almost every day religiously confine myself in my study and write zestfully for hours from morning after breakfast up to night with intermittent breaks. Soon, I was beginning to get lost in the imaginary world I was starting to create. My first story was in 1972 in response to a call for contributions to a short story competition. It might have been part of the preliminary run-down to our participation in FESTAC in Lagos Nigeria. Ever since then I have been engrossed in writing one thing or another. But at some time I would be mostly preoccupied with reading and editing the scripts of my slowly accumulating story collections. But the dim prospects of being published were a damper to accelerated writing. But I still kept an eye on my work as treasures to be preserved for posterity. Some of the stories: "The Day of Judgment Has Arrived", "Bra Spider's Flight on his Friend Bra Cunny Rabbit's Success" have been adaptations of folktale I have heard, collected and translated from Krio. "Requiem for the Presumptuous Mister Courifer" has been an adapted version of Adelaide Caseley Hayford's "Mister Courife. "Richard Gets Lured into a Wide Reading and Literate Culture "is an adaptation of the autobiography of a section of black American writer, Richard Wright who in fact passed through Freetown on his way to Ghana in 1954 a year before I was born. "A dream of Coming into Great Wealth Turns Sour" an adaptation of a fascinating episode in the life of Olaudah Equiano, the first major black African writer to have emerged from the dungeons of slavery to line the