After recovering from the humiliation of having his book about Brazil rejected by Knopf, Lawrence gives up writing altogether and embarks on another adventure, "the only thing I seemed to be good for." He sets out for the world's first Black Republic, Haiti, which the New York Times says has opened up to foreign businessmen, after the death of the xenophobic tyrant "Papa Doc" Duvalier... On an Episcopalian Church mission in the Haitian backlands, Lawrence trains sugar cane cutters to make his original leather satchels, with monthly shipments to the boutiques of Greenwich Village. But he hasn't counted on the perfidy of the outwardly friendly local priest, who turns out to be an old henchman of the Duvalier regime and anxious to "nationalize" Lawrence's little factory. The moment has sadly come for Lawrence to leave his beloved Haiti "in a hurry," and, literally under cover of darkness, he moves his workshop and mother out to what becomes, in his quest to happily ply his trade, a far-flung succession of Caribbean places stretching from Cartagena, Colombia, to Saint Barth in the French West Indies...My Very Long Youth is composed of 16 books, whose descriptive titles are: 1) A London War Child Crosses the Ocean 2) Fierce Land of Aztecs, Sweet Isle of Jamaica 3) Coming of Age in Greenwich Village 4) Student from America in Franco's Spain 5) Semi-Barbarian at the Sorbonne 6) From Rue Mouffetard to Rome and Sicily 7) School Teacher in Queens, Logger in California 8) A Poet's Pilgrimage to Rio de Janeiro 9) Shack in the Favela, Village in Bahia 10) Two Foolish Years, and a Fresh Start 11) White and Alone in