Claude McKay - (1890-1948)
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Village Community School, New York City
I. Biography
Claude McKay was born in 1890 on the island of Jamaica and came to the United States to attend college in 1881. He attended Tuskegee Institute which was a college for African American students founded by Booker T. Washington. After staying there for a only a few months, McKay left to study agriculture at Kansas State University. Claude McKay had an excellent education considering many people in the 1920's did not go to college.
He wrote his first book of verse at the age of twenty. It was called Songs of Jamaica. It was his record of black life in Jamaica. He wrote it in dialect verse while living on his father's farm. Claude McKay came to Greenwich Village in 1917 and continued writing poetry. His first American work was published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. In 1919 McKay became an editor of the newspaper "The Liberator." This was a journal publishing mainly white avant-garde writers and McKay was the first African American to hold this type of job.
Claude McKay's book of poems Harlem Shadows is said to be the first major book of the Harlem Renaissance. The term Harlem Renaissance refers to the work of African American novelists and poets who lived in or described the Harlem district of New York City during the 1920's and early '30's. McKay is mainly remembered for his poetry and that, in addition to dialect verse, he wrote many formal rhyming poems as well.
McKay believed it was part of a poet's job to politically inform people's minds. McKay became a Communist, left America in 1922, wrote about the racism of governments and traveled to the Soviet Union and England advocating political change for oppressed people. He did not return to America until 1934. He later became disillusioned with Communism. He continued to write a lot about his views on black America. Many of his poems have to do with the unfairness of America to African Americans. Many others talk about how he loved America.
Mckay wrote a novel called Home to Harlem in 1928 which was a story about a black soldier's return from France after World War I. This book became the first best seller by an African American writer. Some people thought it was a great book while others were less enchanted with it.
In 1937 McKay published his autobiography, A Long Way from Home. It was the culmination of his life as a novelist, essayist, poet, political activist and Communist. Claude McKay was the first African-American writer to receive the medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences. McKay influenced several Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. They all had in common the experience of their race and their writing formed a substantial body of literature to deal with African American life from an African American perspective.
Claude McKay is considered one of the main stimulators of the Harlem Renaissance. He died in 1948 at the age of 58, no longer happy in his adopted country.
II. List of Works
Poetry
Songs of Jamaica, 1912
Constab Ballads, 1912
Harlem Shadows, 1922
Selected Poems, 1953
The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay 1972
The Passion of Claude McKay (Selected Poetry and Prose 1912-1948), 1973
Fiction
Home to Harlem, 1928
Banjo: A Story Without a Plot, 1929
Gingertown, 1932
Banana Bottom, 1933
Trial By Lynching, (reprint 1977 )
My Green Hills of Jamaica, ( reprint 1979)
Prose
A Long Way from Home, 1937
Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 1940
III. Bibliography
Chapman, Abraham. Black Voices: an Anthology of Afro-American Literature. New York: New American Library, 1968.
"Claude McKay (1899-1948)." Ed., Maxwell, William. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Available: www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m-r/mckay/mckay.htm
Clarke, John Henrik, ed. Harlem. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Corbett, William. New York Literary Lights. Saint Paul: Minnesota, 1998.
The Harlem Renaissance. Peterborough NH: Cobblestone Publishing Inc., February, 1991.
McKay, Claude. Selected Poems . New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1999.
This essay was submitted by 8th grade students of Joan Brodsky Schur, a teacher at the Village Community School in New York City.
*Photo from New York. Eyewitness Travel Guides, 1993.