Books by and about Claude McKay

Home to Harlem  / Banjo  /  Banana Bottom  / Gingertown  /  A Long Way from Home  / Harlem: Negro Metropolis  /  Selected Poems 

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Lloyd D. McCarthy, In-Dependence from Bondage: Claude McKay and Michael Manley

Defying the Ideological Clash and Policy Gaps in African Diaspora Relations. (2007)

Edourad Gissant. Caribbean Discourse (2004)  /  Barbara Harlow. Resistance Literature (1987)

Penny M. Von Eschen. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-19 (1997

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Claude McKay

One of the most distinguished poets of our time, Claude McKay (1890-1948) was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, British West Indies (15 September), the son of Thomas Francis and Ann Elizabeth (Edwards) McKay. By Jamaican standards, McKay's family was fairly well off having received land from the bride's and the groom's fathers. Claude was the last of eleven children born to Thomas and Ann (Hannah, in some texts) McKay.

Before he left Jamaica in 1913, McKay published, just after he turned twenty, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. For seventeen months, laude McKay was a policeman. He seemed to have regretted later having been "an agent of colonial oppression in a most brutal manner." In both works McKay made extensive use of the Jamaican language known as a patois of English. he was the first Negro to receive the medal of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. After McKay left Jamaica, he never returned.

In 1913, McKay came to the United States and enrolled in Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute with the intent to study agriculture. During the year, he left Tuskegee and enrolled at Kansas State College where he remained until 1914. He then went to new York. From 1915 to 1918, McKay worked as a waiter and a porter. During this period he published his work in small literary magazines, such as The Seven Arts Magazine (1917), Pearson's (1918, then edited by Frank Harris), and The Liberator.

Between 1918 and 1919, McKay went abroad, visited England and lived in London for more than a year. There he compiled Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920). In 1919, on his return to New York, McKay joined the staff of Liberator magazine as associate editor and continued in that position until 1922, a period in which Max Eastman was then the editor. In 1922, McKay completed Harlem Shadows, a work of poetry considered a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.

That same year McKay visited the USSR. Active in the social justice movement, McKay became a Communist, believing that communism offered his cause hope. McKay traveled extensively abroad; after visits to Berlin and Paris, he settled down in France for a decade. He, however, remained in contact with the expatriate community of American writers. McKay returned to the United States in the early 1930s.

In France, he began to write prose, including three three novels -- Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature; Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). He would later write a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); a book of autobiography and travel, A Long Way from Home (1937), and another autobiographical work, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His final work Selected Poems (1953) was published posthumously.

From 1932 until his death in Chicago 1948, McKay never left the United States. His interest in communism dwindled, according to Sister Mary Anthony:

During  his address to the American Congress in his effort to encourage American aid and American entry in the fight against German nazism, Winston Churchill, UK prime minister, concluded his speech by a reading of McKay's famous poem "If We Must Die." Uncertainty exists whether Churchill was aware of the source and intent of McKay's sonnet, which was a response to the 1919 wave of Negro lynchings in the American South. Doubtless, the sentiments of the poem were universal and in the then historical context of a colonial power, ironic..

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updated 2 October 2007