Claude McKay

McKay, Claude (1890–1948), poet, novelist, journalist, and social and political radical, commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Born Festus Claudius McKay, he was the son of relatively prosperous peasants living in upper Clarendon Parish, Jamaica. Around the age of seven McKay went to live with and be educated by his brother, Uriah Theodore, a schoolteacher. There McKay studied classical and British literary figures and philosophers as well as science and theology. He was also encouraged to write poetry and, during his youth, favored conventional English forms. In 1907 McKay met Walter Jekyll, a white British expatriate and folklorist residing in Jamaica, who urged McKay to write dialect poetry rooted in the island's folk culture. Jekyll remained McKay's close friend and patron for many years and was instrumental in the publication of McKay's first two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912). Songs of Jamaica attempts to capture peasant life and language; Constab Ballads is based on McKay's experiences during a brief period in 1911 as a policeman. Both are primarily in dialect and reveal McKay's efforts to define his literary voice in form and content.

In August 1912 under the pretext of studying agriculture, McKay migrated to the United States to advance his poetic career. He studied at Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State College, but by mid-1914, McKay abandoned the study of farming and moved to New York City. Between 1914 and 1919 McKay worked at various jobs, including as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, an experience later rendered in his first novel, Home to Harlem (1929). During this period McKay wrote poetry and became increasingly involved with political and literary radicals. For a short time in 1919 he was a member of the International Workers of the World; he was a close associate of several African Caribbean Socialists including Hubert H. Harrison, Richard B. Moore, and Cyril Briggs, and he was affiliated with the African Blood Brotherhood. He began a lifelong professional and personal relationship with Max and Crystal Eastman, editors of the Liberator. McKay's most widely anthologized poem, “If We Must Die,” was published in the July 1919 issue of the Liberator and brought him immediate fame.

McKay's political associations led him to England, where he began writing for British Socialist Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Dreadnought. While there, his third volume of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920), was published. Containing no dialect poetry, it was divided between poems commenting on race relations in the United States and others nostalgically recalling island life. Upon returning to the United States in 1921, McKay served as a coeditor of the Liberator, but due to disagreements about the aesthetic objectives of the magazine, McKay resigned his post in July 1922. In the spring of 1922 McKay's fourth volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows, was published and received favorable reviews. Income generated by this volume, combined with McKay's dissatisfaction with left-wing efforts to confront racism in both England and the United States, provoked him to travel to the Soviet Union. In November 1922 he attended the Third Communist International in an unofficial capacity. He was widely embraced by the Russian public and traveled throughout the country for six months, delivering lectures on both art and politics. While in Russia, McKay republished a series of articles he had written for the Soviet press under the title Negroes in America (1923); these essays offer a Marxist interpretation of the history of African Americans.

When McKay left the Soviet Union, he unknowingly embarked upon a decade of unsettled travel throughout Europe and Africa. Though he had been diagnosed with syphilis, an event that marks the beginning of health and financial problems that plagued him until his death, during 1923 McKay spent time in Paris and Berlin, meeting both white American expatriates and African American artists including Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Jean Toomer. In January 1924, with the financial assistance of friends, he moved to southern France to recuperate from repeated illnesses and to complete a novel, “Color Scheme,” which was rejected for publication and subsequently burned by McKay. In 1924 Alain Locke, despite significant political differences with McKay, selected some of McKay's poetry for the influential edition of Survey Graphic that served as the foundation for The New Negro (1925). In 1928, while still in France, McKay published Home to Harlem. Achieving widespread acclaim, Home to Harlem is McKay's most read novel and is often studied within the context of the Harlem Renaissance. His second novel, Banjo (1929), is a commentary on colonialism that focuses on the lives of an international cast of drifters living on the Marseilles waterfront. In 1932, having moved to Morocco, McKay published Gingertown, a collection of short stories alternately set in Jamaica and the United States. In 1933 he published his final novel, Banana Bottom, a romantic tale set in Jamaica that explores both individual and cultural conflict between colonizing and folk forces. Neither book sold well, however.

In 1934, seriously ill and improverished, McKay returned to the United States, where he remained until his death in 1948. During these years McKay struggled to produce more literary works but had difficulty finding publishers; he did, however, write numerous articles for a variety of journals. In 1937 he published his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, and in 1940 he published Harlem: Negro Metropolis, an anti-Communist treatise calling for stronger, community-based African American leadership. In 1944 McKay converted to Catholicism. During the last years of his life he completed an autobiography of his youth titled My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979) and compiled a collection of his poetry for Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953). Both books were published posthumously. McKay died in Chicago on 22 May 1948.

McKay's exploration of the relationship between art and politics, as conveyed in his complex and wideranging writings, establishes him as an important pioneer in African American and African Caribbean intellectual, cultural, and literary history. He is considered an influential predecessor of, as well as participant in, the new Negro movement, an instrumental role model for the founders of the Negritude movement and a resonant historical reference for Black Nationalism during the civil rights era.

Bibliography

• Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background, 1970. Wayne F. Cooper, ed., The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948, 1973.
• Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, 1973.
• James Giles, Claude McKay, 1976.
• Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, 1987.
• Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity, 1992

Heather Hathaway

For more information on Claude McKay, visit Britannica.com.

Claude McKay (1890-1948), Jamaican-born poet and novelist, is often called "the first voice of the Harlem renaissance." His verse and fiction are best known for protesting the social evils that plagued blacks.

Claude McKay was born in Jamaica, British West Indies, on Sept. 15, 1890. He began writing poetry, principally in Jamaican dialect, while a schoolboy. After a brief apprenticeship to a cabinetmaker and a short time as a policeman, he went to the United States and enrolled at Tuskegee Institute; later he went to Kansas State University. Neither school suited him, so he moved to New York, where a little interest in his first two volumes of poems - Constab Ballads and Songs from Jamaica (published in England, 1912) - preceded him.

Under the name Eli Edwards, McKay published a number of poems in American magazines; under his own name he published (in England) Spring in New Hampshire (1920). He was listed as associate editor of the Liberator, a "radical" magazine, which was the first to print "If We Must Die." This poem has come to be thought of as the birth cry of the "new Negro." It set the tone of protest that marks his fourth and best-known volume of verse, Harlem Shadows (1922), which also contains poems on conventional romantic themes.

In 1922 McKay represented the American Workers party at the Third Internationale in Moscow. He stayed in Europe for several years, settling in southern France, where he wrote most of his fiction. Home to Harlem (1928), a sensational revelation of black ghetto life, is his best-known novel. Banjo (1929) does for the French seaport city of Marseilles what the first novel did for New York's Harlem: it portrays life in the lower depths. Gingertown (1932) is a volume of unexceptional short stories, and Banana Bottom (1933), set in the West Indies, returns to his earlier subject matter. His fiction tended to be sensationally "realistic" and to emphasize those sordid elements in Negro life that attracted the prurient interest of the public.

Back in America in 1936 McKay wrote his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937). The fluent ease that characterized his best prose style is missing in this book. In 1940 he published Harlem: Negro Metropolis, a kind of sociohistorical narrative that is interesting but without much substance.

All but forgotten, McKay died in Chicago on May 22, 1948. Selected Poems of Claude McKay appeared in 1953.

Further Reading

There is no full-length work, either critical or biographical, on McKay. For critical comments see J. Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (1939); Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, eds., Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes (1940); Rebecca C. Barton, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography (1948); Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948); and Stephen H. Bronz, Roots of Negro Racial Consciousness, the 1920s: Three Harlem Renaissance Authors (1964).

poet; journalist; essayist; writer

Personal Information

Born Festus Claudius McKay, September 15, 1889, in Sunny Ville, Jamaica; immigrated to U.S.; became naturalized U.S. citizen, 1940; died of heart disease, May 22, 1948, in Chicago, IL; buried in Calvary Cemetery, Woodside, NY; son of Thomas Francis (a farmer and landowner) and Hannah Ann Elizabeth (a farmer; maiden name, Edwards) McKay; married Imelda Edwards, July 30, 1914 (divorced); children: Ruth Hope.
Education: Attended Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, 1912, and Kansas State College, 1912-14.
Politics: Independent socialist.
Religion: Converted to Catholicism, 1945.

Career

Poet, journalist, essayist, fiction writer. Woodworker's apprentice, Brown's Town, Jamaica, and constable, Kingston, both c. 1906; worked as a longshoreman, porter, bartender, and waiter, off and on beginning in 1910; first volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, published in London, 1912; immigrated to United States, 1912; settled in New York City, 1914, and became a restaurateur; business failed; poems published in several journals, 1917-19; traveled to London and worked as a journalist, 1919-20; coeditor of the Liberator, New York City, 1921-22; attended Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, Moscow, 1922; writer in Europe and North Africa, 1923-34; returned to the United States, February, 1934; took shelter in Catholic Friendship House, 1941; moved to Chicago, 1944.

Life's Work

A major literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Jamaican-born American poet Claude McKay dedicated his life to writing verse that promoted spiritual freedom and humanitarian social and political values. Tormented by the discriminatory barriers confronting African Americans in the twentieth century, McKay vented his feelings of frustration through poetry and served as a voice for awakening the masses to the devastating effects of racism in a white-dominated society. Although he is best known for his militantly angry poetic style, McKay also dealt with less inflammatory themes: his colorful pastoral scenes of the Jamaican countryside and lyrical ruminations on the beauty of Harlem dancers are especially memorable. A respected philosopher, a celebrant of primitivism, and the author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction works, McKay produced a vast number of writings that helped lay the foundation for the emergence of modern African American literature.

Festus Claudius McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, on September 15, 1889, to Hannah Ann Elizabeth, a woman of warm humanitarian values, and Thomas McKay, a strictly pious Christian and successful landowner. McKay enjoyed a pleasant childhood playing within the mountain villages scattered throughout the Jamaican countryside. At age four, he attended school at Mt. Zion Church where he exhibited a strong interest in history and geography. Placed under the tutelage of his brother U Theo, a free-thinker and lay preacher, McKay was exposed to classical literature, socialist views, and the ideas of natural science and evolutionary naturalism. In his brother's library, McKay spent long hours reading William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and the biological and philosophical treatises of Thomas Huxley, Ernest Haekel, and Herbert Spencer. Through the guidance and encouragement of U Theo, McKay began to develop skills as a writer and poet.

In 1907, McKay's literary talent attracted the notice of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman and man of letters who urged McKay to write poetry in the native Jamaican dialect. Although most learned Jamaicans considered peasant dialect a "vulgar tone," Jekyll awakened McKay to the natural beauty and rhythm of the language. At 23, McKay completed two volumes of dialect poetry: Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Awarded a gold medal by the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences in Kingston, these two works contained a number of poems describing the hardships and racial injustices suffered by the Jamaican peasantry, as well as works celebrating the grandeur of "Old England."

Upon the completion of his "free-thinking" education, McKay aspired to become a "peasant poet," supporting himself by farming in the Jamaican countryside. In order to prepare himself for the task of advancing Jamaican agriculture, McKay left for the United States in 1912 to study agronomy (field-crop production) at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. But, disenchanted with Tuskegee's "machine-like" existence and "semi-military" organization, McKay left after a few months to attend Kansas State College. He tired of his studies after two years, however, and cancelled his plans to become an agronomist. "The demon of poets had got hold of me," recalled McKay in his autobiography A Long Way from Home. "I became a vagabond--but a vagabond with a purpose. I was determined to find expression in writing."

With funds acquired from an anonymous benefactor, McKay, like thousands of resourceful West Indians, traveled to Harlem in New York City in 1914. Once in Harlem, McKay joined the Negro Renaissance writers' revolt against white cultural standards by seeking to write works reflecting the life of the black masses. Like the other young Renaissance writers, McKay's primary aim was to exalt the cultural heritage of people of color and to legitimize the differences inherent in all cultures. McKay claimed in A Long Way from Home that by reading all the great poets he "could feel their race, their class, their roots in the soil." Thus, he set out to write poetry that would express the uniqueness of the black experience.

Drawn to the capital of black culture, McKay became impassioned by the jazz music and stage shows featured on Harlem's 135th Street. After establishing himself as the proprietor of a small restaurant in the black section of mid-Manhattan, McKay married his Jamaican childhood sweetheart, Imelda Edwards, on July 30, 1914. Within a few months, however, McKay faced failure in business and marriage. On her return to Jamaica shortly afterward, Imelda gave birth to McKay's only child, Ruth Hope, a daughter he would never see. Disillusioned by middle class pursuits and without ambition to resume a formal education, McKay's rebellious nature led him to return to the writing of poetry. While working as a stevedore, porter, and busboy, McKay divided his time between observing the condition of black workers and writing.

In search of an editor, McKay came into contact with Joel Spingarn, literary critic and early founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who recommended McKay to James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, editors of the avant garde publication Seven Arts. Despite their criticism of McKay's formal sonnet style, Oppenheim and Frank published two of McKay's poems, "Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation," in the December 1917 issue of Seven Arts. That same year, McKay took a job as a dining car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, a job that exposed him to the many African American communities located in the cities of the industrial Northeast. In 1918, McKay was introduced to Frank Harris, editor of Pearson's Magazine, who published five of his poems including "The Lynching."

Following the end of the First World War in 1918, McKay, like a great number of black Americans, became disillusioned over the resurgence of racial violence and the indifferent treatment of black veterans in the United States. He had long been aware of racial injustice, but he was deeply disturbed by the bloody race riots of 1919 that swept through major American cities like Chicago. It was at this time that McKay met Max Eastman, a Communist sympathizer and chief editor of a radical publication called the Masses. In Eastman, McKay found a literary mentor and personal confidant who remained one of his closest lifelong friends. McKay's association with Eastman helped strengthen his radical political views and establish him as a member of New York's postwar Greenwich Village literary scene.

In reaction to the wave of racial violence and the U.S. government's suppressive actions against domestic radicalism during the "Red Scare" of 1919, McKay wrote the powerful poem "If We Must Die." Published in the July edition of the Liberator, the successor of the Masses, "If We Must Die" is a bitter yet profound poem calling for a universal movement against oppression--one that embodied such a passionately human message that British statesman and author Winston Churchill quoted from it in a speech he gave during World War II.

Though it was criticized by conservative African Americans, "If We Must Die" appeared in black newspapers across the country, earning him national recognition as one of America's most talented new black poetic voices. But the poem also attracted the attention of the U.S. State Department's committee investigating African American radicals. The State Department's attempt to label the poem as radical, antidemocratic propaganda put a great deal of pressure upon McKay who, since quitting the railroad job earlier that year, had joined the revolutionary organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World.

But not long afterward, McKay received an opportunity to travel to Europe at the expense of two English admirers of his poetry. Bound for London in late 1919, McKay continued his involvement in radical politics. Upon joining the International Club, McKay became exposed to various European radical intellectuals and the serious study of Marxist ideology, which calls for the achievement of a classless society. For the year he remained in England, McKay worked as journalist for Workers' Dreadnought, a Communist weekly publication edited by Sylvia Pankhurst. "In a real sense McKay completed in London the political self-education he had begun in the United States," wrote historian Wayne F. Cooper in Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance--A Biography. But once in England, as Cooper pointed out, all of McKay's romantic thoughts of the grandeur of British culture quickly waned: he became a disillusioned witness to the racial inequities faced by foreign-born blacks and the left-wing apathy toward the plight of the nationalist movements in Ireland, India, and other countries under colonial rule.

After returning to New York in the winter of 1921, McKay was able to earn a steady income by taking a job as the assistant editor of the Liberator. In Harlem, McKay met with a circle of black socialists including Hubert Harrison and members of the African Blood Brotherhood led by Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore. At this time McKay also befriended intellectuals like writer James Weldon Johnson--then executive secretary of the NAACP--who hailed his work as "too powerful to be confined to the circle of race." In the spring of 1922, while McKay continued his editing job at the Liberator, a collection of poems titled Harlem Shadows was published as his first American book. A work containing seventy poems, all of which had been written since McKay's arrival in the United States in 1912, Harlem Shadows emerged as a great critical success that marked a major turning point in his literary career.

Troubled by disputes over race and political ideology among the Liberator 's staff members, McKay left the magazine in June of 1922. The author had grown weary of the racist conditions in the United States and became committed to a global political and social outlook. Although not a member of the Communist party, McKay decided to travel to Soviet Russia to observe the "grand experiment" of communism. He joined the millions of workers, writers, and intellectuals who, as he wrote in A Long Way from Home, became fascinated by "the Russian thunder rolling around the world."

With funds raised by friends and colleagues, McKay traveled to Liverpool, England, and then Berlin, where he secured a visa to enter the Soviet Union. Arriving in Moscow early in November 1922, McKay was stirred by the "semi-oriental" splendor of Russian culture and the vibrant character of Moscow, which he described as a "bright Byzantine fair."

In Moscow, McKay was allowed to attend the meeting of the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, or Comintern. One of the few blacks among the delegation, McKay spoke out against racial oppression and the American Communist party's stance on maintaining an underground organization in the United States. His presence influenced the Soviets to create a Negro Commission intended to address the black struggle against racism. During his six-month stay, McKay found that his color and physical features made him a celebrity among the Russian people. On one occasion, for example, a joyful crowd of Russian peasants and soldiers carried McKay through the streets of Moscow on their shoulders.

In May of 1923, McKay left Russia and set out on a new career as an expatriate novelist. After a brief stay in Germany, he traveled to Paris where he fell ill with influenza in December. Despite his colorful experience with the Russian people, McKay's trip to the Soviet Union did little to arouse his earlier interest in communism. As a true artist, McKay found communism too disciplined and confining to his aesthetic outlook. Determined to become a novelist, McKay left Paris in January of 1924 for the French Mediterranean coastal seaport of Marseilles.

During time spent in nearby Toulon in 1925, McKay completed his first novel, titled Color Scheme, which was never published. Destitute and with no hope of publishing his novel, McKay wrote a series of short stories describing Negro life in Harlem. Eventually McKay expanded one of the stories into the novel Home to Harlem, a work dealing with a black soldier's return to New York following World War I. A landmark of black literature, Home to Harlem appeared in 1928 and emerged as one of the first bestsellers of African American literature. However, several leading black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, admonished McKay for producing an exploitative work of fiction that depicted black characters as lowly, unrestrained, and primitively passionate. According to Du Bois, Home to Harlem plays upon deeply entrenched, ill-conceived, stereotypical images of people of color--the very images that many black critics had worked so many years to erase--and therefore exacerbated the racist conditions plaguing African Americans in a white-dominated society.

By late 1928, McKay had journeyed to Morocco, where be became acquainted with the Moorish culture of cities like Casablanca, Fez, and Marakesh. While in North Africa, McKay worked on his second novel, Banjo, which was published in 1929. The story of Negro vagabond sailor/musician "Banjo," also known as Lincoln Agrippa Daily, Banjo, like its predecessor, describes a black man's struggle within white society and his search for the true meaning of human existence.

Over the next four years, McKay resided for brief periods in Germany, Spain, and North Africa. In 1932 he published a book of twelve poems under the title Gingertown. The next year, the novel Banana Bottom-- about an educated black Jamaican women's attempt to return to the peasant culture of her youth--emerged as McKay's last and most critically acclaimed work of long fiction. Banana Bottom is said to exemplify the maturity and refinement of McKay's use of theme and form, but like Gingertown, the book failed to sell and left McKay further in debt to his publisher. After living as a peasant poet in a small rented cottage in Tangiers, McKay decided to return to the United States. Without assurance of employment, McKay sailed for New York on February 1, 1934.

Arriving in New York after a twelve-year hiatus, McKay faced many obstacles amid the economic crisis of the Great Depression. As the Harlem Renaissance literary scene fell into decline during the early 1930s, African American writers found they no longer were given the attention and prestige they once received in the white market place. Plagued by health problems and the effects of poverty, McKay also experienced the pain of loneliness and isolation. In 1936 he published his autobiography A Long Way from Home, in which he stresses the need for blacks to develop cultural and economic solidarity in order to take their place in a new socialist universal order. McKay's last book, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, published in 1940, was written from the research gathered during his employment at the Federal Writers Project, a government relief program designed to offer jobs to unemployed writers.

As the next decade progressed, McKay's health steadily worsened. Stricken with dropsy and utterly destitute, he sought refuge in the Catholic Friendship House. Upon the invitation of Bishop Bernard Sheil, McKay moved to Chicago in 1944, where he joined the Catholic Church a year later. In Catholicism, McKay found physical and spiritual shelter and a universal theology that he believed could counter the forces of communism and fascism. Near the end of his life, McKay completed a memoir of his childhood, My Green Hills of Jamaica, which remained unpublished until 1981. In reference to the book, McKay related in a letter to Max Eastman, "I do not want to go sour on humanity, even after living in this awful land of the U.S.A. I still like to think of people as I did as a boy in Jamaica."

Despite his disillusionment and years of alienation, McKay never lost the faith that somewhere in human beings there exists a hidden spiritual force, one that had been left in the shadows of totalitarian regimes, capitalist exploitation, and colonial domination. For McKay, art was never a means of escape, but a way to confront the world and to expose the true nature of the human spirit. His poetry connects the black artist's struggle with the struggles of all humanity. An elder member of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay led the way for the emergence of a modern African American literary tradition that includes such writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. McKay's work is representative of the black artist's struggle to gain recognition in the Western world. Like so many other artistic geniuses who lived their lives as outsiders, McKay remained the peasant poet in the modern age, a poetic visionary devoted to awakening the minds and spirits of all humanity.

Awards

Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, gold medal, 1912, for two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads; Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, 1929, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem; James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award, 1937.

Works

Writings

• Poetry volumes Songs of Jamaica, Aston W. Gardner, 1912.
• Constab Ballads, Watts, 1912.
• Spring in New Hampshire, Grant Richards, 1920.
• Harlem Shadows, introduction by Max Eastman, Harcourt, 1922.
• Novels Home to Harlem, Harper, 1928.
• Banjo: A Story without a Plot, Harper, 1929.
• Banana Bottom, Harper, 1933.

• Negry v Amerike (nonfiction), Russian-language version published in Moscow, 1923, re-translated into English and published as The Negroes in America, Kennikat, 1977.
• Gingertown (short stories), Harper, 1932.
• A Long Way from Home (autobiography), Lee Furman, 1937.
• Harlem: Negro Metropolis (nonfiction), E. P. Dutton, 1940.
• My Green Hills of Jamaica (memoir), 1981.
• Collections Selected Poems of Claude McKay, introduction by John Dewey, biographical note by Max Eastman, Bookman, 1953.
• The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay, edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
• The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Schocken, 1973.
• Contributor to periodicals, including Workers' Dreadnought, Negro World, Catholic Worker, Seven Arts (under pseudonym Eli Edwards), New York Herald Tribune Books, Phylon, Pearson's Magazine, Liberator, and others.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992, pp. 1375-1401.
• Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1954.
• Cooper, Wayne F., Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance--A Biography, Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
• Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origin to the Present, Morrow, 1967.
• Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, reprinted, Penguin, 1982.
• Fullwinder, S. P., The Mood and Mind of Black America: 20th Century Thought, Dorsey Press, 1969.
• Gayle, Addison, Jr., Claude McKay: The Black Poet at War, Broadside Press, 1972.
• Giles, James R., Claude McKay, Twayne, 1976.
• McKay, Claude, A Long Way from Home, Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969.
• McKay, Claude, The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Schocken, 1973.
• McKay, Claude, Selected Poems of Claude McKay, introduction by John Dewey, biographical note by Max Eastman, Bookman, 1953.
• Tillery, Tyrone, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
• Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, translated from original French by Kenneth Douglas, University of Illinois Press, 1973.

• CLA Journal, March 1972; June 1973; December 1975; March 1980.
• Crisis, June 1928, p. 202.
• Nation, June 7, 1922, pp. 694-95.
• Phylon, Fall 1948; Fall 1964.

— John Cohassey

Claude McKay (September 15, 1889^[1]– May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican writer and poet. He was a communist in his early life, but after a visit to the Soviet Union, decided that communism was too disciplined and confining. He was never an actual member of the Communist Party. McKay was involved in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922) was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), was published posthumously.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 McKay and the Harlem Renaissance 4 Home to Harlem and Other Works 5 Legacy 6 Awards 7 References

Early life

McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay. Born in James Hill^[2], Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay was the youngest in the family. His father, Thomas Francis McKay, and his mother, Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, were well-to-do peasant farmers, and had enough property to qualify to vote.

At age four, McKay started school at M.D at the church he attended. At age seven, McKay was sent to live with his oldest brother, a school teacher, to be given the best education available. While living with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, McKay became an avid reader and started writing poetry at the age of 10. While under his brother's teachings, McKay studied classical and British literary figures and philosophers as well as science and theology.

In 1906, McKay became an apprentice to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenga. He stayed in his apprenticeship for about two years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met a man named Walter Jekyll who became a mentor and an inspiration for him. He encouraged McKay to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect and even later set some of McKay's verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. These were the first poems published in Patois (dialect of mainly English words with a strong African structure).

McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads, came out in the same year and was based on his experience as a police officer in Jamaica. He left for the U.S. that year as well, and went to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. Disliking the "semi-military, machinelike existence there", McKay quickly left to study at Kansas State University. His political involvement dates from these days. He also read W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him.

Despite doing well in exams, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and went to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars.

Career

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McKay had two poems published in 1917 in Seven Arts under the Alias Eli Edwards. However, McKay continued to work as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as Co-Executive Editor until 1922). It was here that he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. This was among a page of his poetry which signalled the commencement of his life as a professional writer.

During McKay's time with The Liberator, he had affairs with both men and women, including Waldo Frank and Edward Arlington Robinson. Details on his relationships are few.^[3]

McKay became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle class reformist NAACP. These included the African Caribbeans Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore and Wilfrid Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded the semi-secret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood. McKay soon left for London, England.

Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. He used to frequent a soldier's club in Drury Lane and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. A militant atheist, he also joined the Rationalist Press Association. It was during this period that McKay's commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. He was soon invited to write for the Workers' Dreadnought.

In 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine", it insinuated gross hypersexuality on African people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay's response. This response then appeared in Workers' Dreadnought. This started his regular involvement with Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organization. He became a paid journalist for the paper; some people claim he was the first black journalist in Britain. He attended the Communist Unity Conference which established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden.

When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition amongst His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of "The Yellow peril and the Dockers" attributed to Leon Lopez, which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against the Workers' Dreadnought.

In 1922 he visited the Soviet Union and attended the fourth congress of the Communist International in Moscow. There, he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek.

McKay and the Harlem Renaissance

McKay was a substantial figure who emerged as one of the first and most militant voices of the Harlem Renaissance. He was regarded as one of the first major poets of the movement. Some of his most famous poems during that period were the militant If We Must Die (1919) and his self portrait Outcast, which was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922).

McKay also wrote lyrics reminiscent of his Jamaican homeland and works about love and exile, such as the Tropics in New York and Harlem Dancer. The tone for many of his works have been described as race-conscious and revolutionary. He was an advocate for full civil liberties and racial solidarity. McKay’s pride in his culture and racial awareness helped stimulate expression in African American literacy.

Home to Harlem and Other Works

In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe.^[4]

McKay's novel gained a substantial readership, especially with people who wanted to know more about the intense, and sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the "uprooted black vagabonds." Home to Harlem was a work in which McKay looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity.

Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay's heroes, W. E. B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black "licentiousness." As Du Bois said, "Home to Harlem ... for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath."^[4] Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people.^[5]

McKay's other novels were Banjo (1930), and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated black colonists, as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice". Banana Bottom was McKay's third novel. The book is said to follow a principal theme of a black individual in search of establishing a cultural identity in a white society. The book discusses underlying racial and cultural tensions.

McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), and his second autobiography, My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979), were published posthumously.

Becoming disillusioned with communism, McKay embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he converted in 1944.^[6] He died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 59.

Legacy

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Claude McKay on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[7] He is regarded as the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" and his works heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright.^[8]

Awards

• Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, gold medal, 1912, for two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads;
• Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, 1929, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem;
• James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award, 1937.

References

1. ^ See James, Winston (2003), "Becoming the People's Poet: Claude McKay's Jamaican Years, 1889-1912," in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, March 2003, No. 13, pp. 17-45; footnote 8. There has been much confusion over whether McKay was born in 1889 or 1890, but his birth certificate has been discovered showing that he was, in fact, born in 1889.
2. ^ Many sources claim this birthplace; however, James, Winston (2003) says McKay was born in the village of Nairne Castle.
3. ^ Aldrich, Robert; Wotherspoon, Garry (2001), Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, Routledge, pp. 287, ISBN 0415159822 
4. ^ ^{a b} Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem - Critical Essay | African American Review | Find Articles at BNET.com
5. ^ The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
6. ^ James, Winston (2001). A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay's Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (London: Verso), p. 46.
7. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
8. ^ Claude McKay

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