ABSTRACT 
This dissertation examines the two volumes of 
published short stories of Roger Mais, Face and Other 
Stories and And Most Of All Man, and argues that the 
fundamental concern with the human condition that 
lies beneath the surface level of social consciousness 
in the writer's two best known novels, The Hills Were 
Joyful Together and Brother Man, was, from the very 
beginning of his career as a writer of fiction, his 
major preoccupation. In so doing, the thesis offers 
a broad classification of the stories according to 
subject matter in an effort to show how the writer's 
wide ranging themes embrace all the social classes with­
in the Jamaican society. A discussion of his theory 
of the New World artist and of his artistic vision seeks 
to establish his affinity to proletariat subjects and 
to certain recurrent themes. The restricted content 
analysis of ten representative proletariat stories, 
grouped according to their urban or rural setting, and 
a further consideration of certain stylistic and formal 
techniques are put forward to verify the proposition 
that Mais's concern in his proletariat stories is, 
as he himself stated, with humanity "amid eternal process