Merle Hodge is a Trinidadian novelist and essayist. Hodge is recognized as the first black Caribbean woman to publish a major work of fiction—the novel Crick Crack, Monkey (1970). Centred on the childhood and adolescence of a young woman in the British colony of Trinidad, the novel treats such subjects as the search for identity, racism, gender, social divisions, and colonial education. In 1993 Hodge published a second novel, For the Life of Laetitia, a narrative aimed at young adults.