The educator and diplomat wrote the international best-seller as well as the popular Sidney Poitier movie of the same name.
E.R. Braithwaite, the Guyanese author, educator and diplomat whose years teaching in the slums of London's East End inspired the international best-seller To Sir, With Love and the popular Sidney Poitier movie of the same name, has died. He was 104.
His companion, Ginette Ast, told the Associated Press that Braithwaite became ill Monday and died at the Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville, Md.
Schooled in Guyana, the U.S. and the U.K., Braithwaite wrote several fiction and nonfiction books, often focusing on racism and class and the contrast between first world and colonial cultures. He was regarded as an early and overlooked chronicler of Britain from a non-white's perspective, with his admirers including the authors Hanif Kureishi and Caryl Phillips.
Braithwaite also served in the 1960s as the newly independent Guyana's first representative at the United Nations and later was ambassador to Venezuela. Upon his 100th birthday, he received an honorary medal from his native country for lifetime achievement.
Guyana President David Granger on Tuesday remembered Braithwaite as "an eminent Guyanese and distinguished diplomat."