Claude McKay

Claude McKay - Jamaica's Poet Laureate

Claude McKay
(1890-1948)
Photo: Carl Van Vecten

Festus Claudius McKay was born in Clarendon in 1890 to Thomas and Hannah McKay, farmers. The youngest of eleven children he would go on to become one of the leading figures of the 1920s American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Home to Harlem
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ISBN: 1555530249
Format: Textbook Paperback, 340pp
Publisher: Northeastern University Press

From the Publisher
"Jake is on the run. After serving overseas with the U.S. Army, he goes AWOL and makes his own way back home to Harlem. Back to the life he had before. Back to the basement joints, pool rooms and rent parties. Back to brown breasts throbbing with love and brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing." No hero's welcome awaits him. Only the same hard-drinking, hard-living scrabble for love and a home that he left behind. In this world of gamblers, loan sharks, lonely women and rivals in love, Jake seems to have it all. But the women of Harlem aren't the only ones keen to make this fine-looking soldier their man. Uncle Sam wants him too!

From The Critics
Mr. McKay's book assails the optical, the olfactory, the kinaesthetic antennae whereby the human being takes in the world about him. In less stilted phrases, you can see, smell and feel what he writes. . . . Much of the charm of Home to Harlem is in the easy, unforced conversation of the many characters. -- Books of the Century; �John Chamberlain, New York Times review, March 1928

Claude McKay Selected Poems
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ISBN: 0486408760
Format: Paperback, 80pp
Publisher: Dover Publications

New compilation of verse by important Jamaican-American poet. Dialect verse, standard English poems from Harlem Shadows, uncollected works, more. Edited and with an Introduction by Joan R. Sherman.

Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay (1889-1948) came to the U.S. in 1912 and became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. This inexpensive edition includes a representative sample of his Jamaican dialect verse, but concentrates on poems from Harlem Shadows (1922) and uncollected verse. Edited and with an Introduction by Joan R. Sherman.

Banjo
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ISBN: 0156106752
Format: Paperback, 336pp
Publisher: Harcourt

A novel about a group of Negro drifters living on the Marseilles waterfront in the 1920s.

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as "Banjo," prowls the rough waterfront bistros with his drifter friends, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking - about their homes in Africa, the West Indies, or the american South and about being black.

Banana Bottom
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ISBN: 0156106507
Format: Paperback, 324pp
Publisher: Harcourt

The story of a Jamaican girl, educated in England, who returns to her native village to find her newly-acquired culture at war with her heritage.

From the Publisher
Young Jamaican, Bita Plant, is adopted by white missionary benefactors and sent to England. She returns to her home village of Banana Bottom seven years later, a beautiful, English cultured young lady. Despite the evangelical guidance of her foster parents and the friendship of a with squire, Bita is increasingly drawn to the vitality of her more natural culture with its festivals, superstitions, revival meetings, and passionate courtships. Among her many suitors she chooses to marry the quiet, humble man who allows her to be most true to herself.

A Long Way Home
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ISBN: 0156531453
Format: Paperback, 380pp
Publisher: Harcourt

Journey from Jamaica through New York, Europe, Africa, revolutionary Russia, and back to America in the autobiography of a founding forces in Black literature.

From the Publisher
Claude McKay's long odyssey from Jamaica to Harlem, Europe, North Africa, Russia, and back to America is chronicled in this autobiography of the most militant of the writers to emerge from the New Negro movement following World War I. Whether in the intellectual circles of Harlem and Greenwich Village, the docks of Marseilles, or the inner circles of post-Revolutionary Russia, McKay's contact with such figures as Frank Harris, Max Eastman, George Bernard Shaw, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chaplin, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Trotsky, and Radek all served to advance those views which would be so widely accepted in the 1960s--Black Pride, self-determination, and the necessity for Black culture to define itself.

Complete Poems
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ISBN: 0252028821
ISBN-13: 9780252028823
Format: Hardcover, 456pp
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred published here for the first time, this landmark collection showcases the range and dynamism of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet whose life and poetry were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest.
His first poems, composed in rural Jamaican dialect, won him fame as the "Jamaican Bobby Burns" and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Reinvigorating the standard English sonnet after migrating to New York, McKay helped to spark the Harlem Renaissance with modern classics such as "If We Must Die."

Coming under scrutiny for his Bolshevist views, McKay left America in 1922 and spent twelve years roaming from Moscow to Tangier via Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. These shifts in location led to shifts in form, subject, and language, and when McKay returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union, his pristine "Violent sonnets" gave way to confessional lyrics strongly informed by his newfound Catholicism.

McKay eludes easy definition, which is why this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, is at once necessary and rewarding. Here the reader can trace the complex, transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.