In the Castle of My Skin was Lamming's first novel. In the same decade that this novel appeared, he also published three other important works of fiction: The Emigrants (1955), Of Age and Innocence (1958), and A Season of Adventure (1960). Each of these novels explores dimensions of the life experiences of Caribbean people interacting with colonial powers.

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

Born on Martinique and of the same generation as Lamming, Frantz Fanon is a writer whose works of cultural criticism and theory formed the intellectual structure for many of the anti-colonial independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s. His most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks (1954) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), analyze the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized people.

In 1992, the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His career as a poet and playwright spanned half of the twentieth century, but perhaps his greatest work is the epic poem Omeros (1989), a retelling of the Odysseus myth in a Caribbean, postcolonial context. Walcott, along with the novelist V. S. Naipaul, continues to be one of the most important and influential Caribbean writers in the world today.