Julian Mayfield was an African-American novelist, playwright, autobiographer, and university professor from South Carolina. He took a job teaching at Cornell University in 1967, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1975 to 1978, and he was the writer-in-residence at Howard University from 1978 until his death in 1984.
Mayfield has spend a few years working abroad during the 1970s. From 1971 until 1975, he worked for the Guyanese government of Forbes Burnham in its attempt to modernize the country. In 1976, Mayfield served as an expatriate teacher in both West Germany and Turkey. He met and married the Guyanese journalist and novelist Joan Cambridge while living in Guyana. The couple collaborated as writers of the novel "Murder on the East Bank", but the novel was never published.