Claude McKay (1890–1948)

Author of Home to Harlem

28+ Works 1,197 Members 5 Reviews 2 Favorited

About the Author

Includes the names: Claude McKay, Claude McKay; Introduction John Dewey; Biographica

Image credit: Photo by Carl Van Vechten. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division LC-USZ62-105919)

Works by Claude McKay

Popular Recent

Home to Harlem (1928) 292 copies

Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929) 156 copies

Romance in Marseille (2020) 149 copies

Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions) (1953) 125 copies

Banana Bottom (1933) 112 copies

Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics) (2018) 100 copies

Long Way From Home (1969) 74 copies

Harlem Shadows: The Poems Of Claude Mckay (1922) (2009) 61 copies

Complete Poems (2004) 39 copies

Harlem, Negro metropolis (1940) 21 copies

The passion of Claude McKay; selected poetry and prose, 1912-1948 (1973) 19 copies

Harlem Glory: A Fragment Of Aframerican Life (1990) 17 copies

Gingertown (1977) 4 copies

My green hills of Jamaica and five Jamaican short stories 4 copies

Songs of Jamaica (2021) 3 copies

If We Must Die [poem] (2022) 3 copies

My green hills of Jamaica (1922) 3 copies

Romance in Marseille, and Three Short Stories (Representing American Culture) (2008) 2 copies

Harlem Dancer 2 copies

Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay (The Black heritage library collection) (1977) 2 copies

The White House [poem] 2 copies

“Old England” 1 copy

By McKay, Claude Claude Mckay: Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions) Paperback - March 2003 (2003) 1 copy

America 1 copy

Selected poems of Claude MacKay 1 copy

Spring in New Hampshire and other poems (2019) 1 copy

The Negroes in America (1979) 1 copy

If We Must Die, Let it Not Be Like Hogs” 1 copy

Work Explorer

Associated Works

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000) — Contributor — 1,270 copies

Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contributor, some editions — 929 copies

The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925) — Contributor — 441 copies

American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (2000) — Contributor — 439 copies

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994) — Contributor — 409 copies

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology (1992) — Contributor — 393 copies

The Black Poets (1983) — Contributor — 360 copies

Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (1998) — Contributor — 281 copies

African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927 (1997) — Contributor — 251 copies

World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It (1918) — Contributor — 197 copies

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020) — Contributor — 176 copies

From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900-2002 (2002) — Contributor — 174 copies

American Religious Poems: An Anthology (2006) — Contributor — 164 copies

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology (1999) — Contributor — 150 copies

The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000) — Contributor — 149 copies

Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998) — Contributor — 119 copies

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) — Contributor — 116 copies

Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s (2011) — Contributor — 110 copies

Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (1976) — Contributor — 107 copies

Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories (1992) — Contributor — 101 copies

In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry (1656) — Contributor — 100 copies

Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America (1995) — Contributor — 91 copies

Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918 (1998) — Contributor — 84 copies

Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (2007) — Contributor — 76 copies

The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns (2019) — Contributor — 73 copies

The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise Edition (2003) — Contributor — 68 copies

American Sonnets: An Anthology (2007) — Contributor — 66 copies

The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (2012) — Contributor — 63 copies

American Negro Short Stories (1966) — Contributor — 61 copies

Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997) — Contributor — 56 copies

Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City (2020) — Contributor — 53 copies

Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (2011) — Contributor — 48 copies

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (2014) — Contributor — 42 copies

Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (1994) — Contributor — 40 copies

Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (1970) — Contributor — 40 copies

I Hear a Symphony: African Americans Celebrate Love (1994) — Contributor — 33 copies

A Way Out of No Way: Writing about Growing Up Black in America (1996) — Contributor — 33 copies

Graphic Classics: African-American Classics (2011) — Contributor — 31 copies

Harlem U.S.A. (1964) — Contributor — 30 copies

Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore & the Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology (2024) — Contributor — 20 copies

Masquerade: Queer Poetry in America to the End of World War II (2004) — Contributor — 19 copies

Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (2022) — Contributor — 17 copies

Ebony Rising: Short Fiction of the Greater Harlem Renaissance Era (2004) — Contributor — 16 copies

Fairy Poems (2023) — Contributor — 16 copies

Out of Bounds: British, Black, and Asian Poets (2012) — Contributor — 13 copies

Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies

Harlem: Voices from the Soul of Black America (1970) — Contributor — 10 copies

Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World (Poets in the World) (2014) — Contributor — 10 copies

Bright Poems for Dark Days: An Anthology for Hope (2021) — Contributor — 10 copies

The Ethnic Image in Modern American Literature, 1900-1950 (1984) — Contributor — 1 copy

Tagged

20th century (78) African American (207) African American literature (38) African American studies (25) African Americans (49) African-American Literature (35) American (55) American literature (157) American poetry (48) anthology (538) Caribbean (23) collection (45) drama (44) essays (72) fiction (314) Harlem (45) Harlem Renaissance (144) history (80) Library of America (153) literary criticism (40) literature (308) LOA (57) New York (67) New York City (32) non-fiction (158) novel (50) poems (31) poetics (35) poetry (1,172) poetry anthology (44) race (44) read (35) reference (65) short stories (120) textbook (73) to-read (262) unread (25) USA (40) writing (76) WWI (26)

Common Knowledge

Legal name: McKay, Festus Claudius
Other names: Edwards, Eli
Birthdate: 1890-09-15
Date of death: 1948-05-22
Burial location: Calvary Cemetery, Woodside, New York, USA
Gender: male
Nationality: USA
Birthplace: Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, British West Indies
Place of death: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Places of residence: Jamaica, British West Indies
Chicago, Illinois, USA
New York, New York, USA
USSR
France
Spain (show all 8)
Morocco
London, England, UK
Education: Tuskegee Institute
Kansas State University
Occupations: poet
novelist
short-story writer
editor
Relationships: Bontemps, Arna (friend)
Organizations: The Liberator (editor)
International Socialist Club
Rationalist Press Association
Workers' Socialist Federation
Workers' Dreadnought
Awards and honors: James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award (1937)
Order of Jamaica (1977)
Short biography: Claude McKay (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the U.S. in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica.

Members

Reviews

Home To Harlem (New England Library Of Black… by Claude McKay

“Theah’s life anywheres theah’s booze and jazz…”

Zeddy’s sage wisdom that he shares with Jake! They run around Harlem, chasing women and going to speakeasies and cabarets - drinking, gambling, and listening to jazz. Trying to find a woman to take care of them, both financial and physically. The story winds throughout Harlem, and a little aside on a train that Jake works on for a bit. It's a good story, and reminded me a lot of the "Beat" writing that came after. Glad I read it!… (more)

Flagged

Stahl-Ricco | Sep 22, 2021 |

Amiable with Big Teeth (A Penguin Classics Hardcover) by Claude McKay

I didn't really enjoy reading this book. But I loved it anyway. It felt more like a primary resource discovered in a dusty part of the smithsonian archive than it felt like a living novel. I can see why it stayed unpublished for many years. It's intellectually and ideologically complex, and it doesn't fit into any of the easy categories that were available to African American writers at the time (if they wanted to be published that is). I'm thinking for instance of Richard Wright's simplistic and polemical acceptance of communist thought in the last half of [b:Native Son|15622|Native Son|Richard Wright|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440820866s/15622.jpg|3159084]. This book in contrast is self-critical and questioning and not at all simple. It mocks the attractions of communism as a possible way toward racial equality, but it is equally skeptical of other -isms. Because it is so much more a 'head' story than a 'heart' story it reminds me far more of Lionel Trilling's novel [b:The Middle of the Journey|544060|The Middle of the Journey|Lionel Trilling|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320440371s/544060.jpg|391679] than of other Harlem Renaissance fiction--it's a novel of ideas, so much so that I could almost feel McKay debating between alternatives in his head as he wrote. Fascinating but not for the usual reasons.… (more)

Flagged

poingu | Feb 22, 2020 |

Harlem Shadows: The Poems Of Claude Mckay (1922) by Claude Mckay

In Harlem Shadows (published 1922), McKay captures his shock and disappointment at the discrimination he found in the United States. Racial identity is a key theme throughout the volume, and I found these themes hidden in many poems. He also wrote poems that encouraged people to be themselves, and his personal voice gives these poems an urgency. He also poignantly captures his homesickness for his tropical home. And although he wrote Harlem Shadows almost a century ago, his search for identity and place in a busy foreign world is one that we can still relate to.

I am a white woman and a stay-at-home mom living close to where I was born, and yet McKay’s racial frustrations and calls for individuals to remain strong, as well as his longings for the familiar, resonate with me. McKay’s beautiful poetry is well worth reading and revisiting.

More on my blog… (more)

Flagged

rebeccareid | Apr 21, 2011 |

Banana Bottom (Harvest Book, Hb 273) by Claude McKay

This novel took me to another place, era and culture. The novel started off pretty slow, but I gave it a chance and I'm glad I did because it became engaging. I'm glad I discovered McKay. I'll be looking out for some of his other work.

Flagged

petersonvl | Mar 22, 2009 |

See More Reviews