In the Castle of My Skin marked Lamming's debut as a novelist. During the same decade, he released three additional significant works: The Emigrants (1955), Of Age and Innocence (1958), and A Season of Adventure (1960). Each of these novels delves into various aspects of Caribbean life and the interactions between its people and colonial authorities.

Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile (1960) is described by Sandra Pouchet Paquet in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature as a "seminal work of self-inquiry and cultural assessment in the context of Caribbean cultural life." This book is arguably Lamming's most influential and widely read publication.

Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique and a contemporary of Lamming, is renowned for his influential cultural criticism and theoretical works. His seminal publications, Black Skin, White Masks (1954) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), critically examine the psychological impacts of colonization on the colonized.

In 1992, Caribbean poet Derek Walcott was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Walcott's career as a poet and playwright spanned much of the twentieth century, with his most acclaimed work being the epic poem Omeros (1989), a reinterpretation of the Odysseus myth set in a Caribbean, postcolonial landscape. Along with novelist V. S. Naipaul, Walcott remains one of the most significant and influential Caribbean writers globally.