[4] His eighteen months of Army service in 1955–56 were spent in the African Gold Coast colony, which became the independent state of Ghana in 1957.
It was the first of several fictional works—the others being The Decline of the West, The K-Factor, and News from Nowhere—that used the African decolonization struggle as a backdrop to the story.
[6] After writing novels primarily in a realist style, Caute started to work more in a postmodernist vein beginning with The Occupation (1972).
It was part of a trilogy (dubbed The Confrontation) that included his play, The Demonstration (1970), and his work of literary theory entitled The Illusion (1971).
[7] In the mid-1960s, Caute began turning his attention to history and biography, starting with Communism and the French Intellectuals 1914–1960 (1964), The Left in Europe Since 1789 (1966), and a 1970 profile of Frantz Fanon.
Jim Burns wrote the following about it in Tribune: "'The Great Fear' chronicles a sad time in American history, but it's good that Caute has brought his committed and informed mind to bear on it.