Vincent O. Carter facts for kids
Vincent O. Carter was an African American writer. He lived most of his adult life in Bern, Switzerland. His most famous book is The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind, which tells his own life story.
Vincent Carter's Life Story
Vincent O. Carter was born in 1924 in Kansas City, Missouri. He grew up there in a very poor family.
When he was a young man, he joined the US Army. He was sent to France during the war. After the war, a program called the G. I. Bill helped him. This program allowed soldiers to go to college.
Vincent Carter studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He also spent a year at Wayne State University in Detroit. While studying, he worked as a cook for the Union Pacific Railroad. He also worked for a car factory in Detroit.
After finishing college, he went back to Europe. In the mid-1950s, he lived in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam. Then, he finally settled in Bern, Switzerland. Bern is the capital city of Switzerland. He wrote most of his books there. He also painted and taught English. Vincent Carter passed away in Bern on December 14, 1983.
His Books
The Bern Book was finished in 1957. It was published in the US in 1973. The full title is The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind. This book is about his own life and experiences. It describes the city of Bern and the people living there. It also shares how people reacted to him as a Black foreigner. A German version of the book was published in Switzerland in 2021.
He also wrote another book called Such Sweet Thunder. This book tells the story of a boy growing up in Kansas City. It shows what life was like in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, Black and white people were kept separate, which was called segregation. This book was finished in 1963 but was not published until 2003.
