Vincent O. Carter was born on 23 June 1924 in Kansas City, Missouri and died on 23 January 1983 in Bern. He grew up in modest circumstances in Kansas City, Missouri, as the son of very young parents. At 17, he joined the US Army, where he landed in Normandy with the US troops during the Second World War and was stationed in France. After the war, he returned to the USA and studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Wayne State in Detroit. He travelled Europe and visited Paris, Amsterdam and Munich before coming to Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a kind of self-imposed exile. Carter published The Bern Book: A Record of the Voyage of the Mind (1970), an autobiographical text from his Swiss years in the 1950s. It oscillates between essay, epistolary novel and novel and, to Carter’s great regret, was only published in the USA. Resigned, he gave up writing and devoted himself to art. His second work, Such Sweet Thunder, was published posthumously in 2003 by Steerforth Press in the USA. There are still two unpublished manuscripts: The Long Green Way and The Secret. In 2021, Limmat Verlag published Das Bernbuch. Meine weisse Stadt und ich in German translation for the first time. In May 2024, Amerigo Jones (original title Such Sweet Thunder) is published by Limmat Verlag to mark Vincent O. Carter’s 100th birthday.
